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THE 



MISSING SENSE, 



THE HIDDEN THINGS WHICH IT MIGHT 
REVEAL. 



SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY 



ON A RATIONAL BASIS. 



■ BY 

C. W. WOOLDRIDGE, B.S., M.D. 







FUNK & WAGNALLS. 

NEW YORK : LONDON : 

loo7. 
18 and 30 Astob Place. 44 Fleet Street. 

All rights reserved. 



3^ a 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1887, 

By FUNK & WAGNALLS, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C. 



PEE FACE. 



Some thoughts are like children — the mind that con- 
ceives them must bring them forth or perish. This, the 
fact that the writer's mind was burdened with the mes- 
sage contained in these pages, is the prime reason why 
this little book is written. The main purpose of the book 
is to show, from observed fact and necessary reason, 
the existence and reality of spiritual intelligence apart 
from matter. 

As to whether we have succeeded in this or not the 
book must speak for itself. On this point the first 
chapter tells the story. Beyond this we have on the 
same basis attempted to examine the functions and scope 
of spirit, and the relations of the present life to the life 
beyond, having ascertained the reality of spirit and a 
future life before indulging in speculations about them. 

There are many who hold our main conclusions to be 
true, at least so far as man is concerned, resting their 
assurance on a basis of faith alone ; many other minds 
are not able to rest with confidence on an assurance of 
immortality which is based on faith, and, lacking con- 
vincing reasons to found it on, the majority of these are 
without any such assurance. 

The first class, perhaps, if their assurance is wholly 
sufficient and satisfactory to themselves, do not for their 
own sakes need such an argument as this, though possibly 
it might be of value to them in their associations with 
others to know that the truths they believe may be 
reached by a path which they have not been accustomed 



IV 4| PREFACE. 

to follow. Of the second class, some who have adopted 
and confirmed themselves in the materialistic view will 
read our argument, and, doubtless, remain unconvinced ; 
but some, let us hope, will find in this jtrain of thought 
the assurance beyond all value which the writer has 
found in it for himself. If so, our work is- not in vain. 

In considering the hereafter, and the relations of the 
present life to the life beyond on the basis of reason and 
not of faith, let no one think we are attacking the relig- 
ion that he holds sacred. We are attacking no one's 
religion ; we would not willingly shake the faith of any 
one who has a religious faith on which he rests with 
confidence and satisfaction ; we would strengthen it, if 
possible, so far as it gives him assurance of what is true. 
Let such hold their faith ; they should regard with satis- 
faction the fact that we reach some of the same conclu- 
sions that they hold to be true, though we reach them 
by a road that they have not travelled. 

Perhaps they do not need our work, but we have done 
what we could for those — and there are many such — 
who cannot rest in faith, but for whom reason must be 
the final arbiter of truth. For them we have worked 
out as we could a rationalist's faith. 

October 1, 1887. 



« CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE UNSEEN UNIVERSE. 

PAGE 

Materialism versus Spiritualism in Quest of Truth 7 

Physical Science on the Ultimate Constitution of Matter 8-9 

The Universal Ether 9-11 

The Nature of Perception through the Senses 12 

Realities not Perceptible through the Senses; Phenomena of 

Telepathy and Clairvoyance 13-17 

Discussion of what these Facts Imply. 18-20 

Dreams . . 20-23 

Discussion of Dream Imagery ; Demonstration of the Reality 

of Spirits 24-27 

Recapitulation , 27-29 

The World Conceived as Without the Sense of Sight 29-31 

CHAPTER II. 

SPIRIT. 

Summary of Conclusions and Discussion of Evidence from Pre- 
ceding Chapter 32-36 

Functions of Spirit Manifested in the Lower Animals, Hence 

these Animals Immortal 36-39 

Spirit the Principle of Life 40 

Intelligence Manifested in Vital Processes ; God made Evident . 41-46 

CHAPTER III. 

MAN AND HIS MEANING. 

All Life from the Living ; Hereditary and Congenital Founda- 
tion of Character 47-49 

The Growth of Character ; Man a Resultant of all his Past 49-50 



Tl CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

The Growth of Character in Infancy 51-52 

in Childhood ....53-55 

in Manhood ; 55-58 

Success 58-60 

In what Character Consists. 60 

Goodness Loved to the Degree in which it is Perceived 61 

The Pursuit of the Ideal 61-66 

The Character of God Revealed through *the Love of Ideal 

Excellence and the Principle of Causality .66-67 

Recapitulation and Deduction of the True Purpose of Life 67-69 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 

The True Purpose of Life a Key to the Problem , .70-75 

Analysis of Evil according to Origin 75-78 

The Penalties of Evil 79-80 

Repentance and Forgiveness , 80-82 

CHAPTER V. 

DESTINY. 

Happiness Dependent on the Choice of the Spirit for Good 83-84 

The Missing Sense, with Enlarged Freedom. Its Necessary 

Effects 84-85 

The Evil of Secrecy. The Bodily Veil a Condition Necessary to 

Adapt the World for the Development of Character 85-86 

Probable Effects of New Conditions 87-88 

Right Character Bears Its Own Title to Heaven 88-89 

CHAPTER VI. 

AUTHORITY AND TRUTH. 

Mode of the Mind's Growth by Assimilation of Truth 90 

Substitution of Authority for Private Judgment Pernicious 91 

Necessity of Effort for the Acquisition of Truth 91-92 

All Truth the Word of God 92-94 

All Human Perceptions of Truth Tainted with Error 94-97 



THE MISSING- SENSE. 



CHAPTER I. 



THE UNSEEN UNIVERSE. 



Thinkees are naturally divided into two great schools, 
materialists and spiritualists. 

Between these schools of thought there is a great ques- 
tion at issue. - 

Scientific research, the loyal and faithful study of facts, 
is the method by which both schools should seek the 
truth, which is the reality underlying, determining, and 
causing all appearances. 

The materialist is rather prone to write and speak as if 
his school of thought were pre-eminently scientific, as 
if all others were prejudiced by the influence of an effete 
theology and so bound in the trammels of moribund 
creeds_ that they are incapable of considering facts with 
clearness of mind, and interpreting them correctly at 
their proper value in revealing the uncolored truth. 

Yet the tendency of scientific research of late years is 
far from being all in the direction of materialism. 
Among the deepest students of nature, including some 
of the world's most eminent chemists and physicists, 
astronomers, spectroscopists, and philosophers, the idea 
has grown from a suspicion almost to a conviction that 
the elementary forms of matter as known to chemistry 



8 THE MISSING SENSE. 

are in reality compounds. By the aid of the spectroscope 
iron has been seen to decompose, in the sun, into two or 
more constituents judged to resemble hydrogen gas more 
nearly than any other ponderable substance with which 
we are acquainted. Similar spectroscopic evidence, both 
in the sun and by the aid of the electric arc, points to a 
similar constitution in the case of many other elements. 
From these, and other indications derived from the rela- 
tions of their atomic weights, it has become probable, 
though not proved, that nearly all the elements are com- 
pound, hydrogen being the most probable exception. If 
this is true it means that the elements are really fewer 
than those known to chemistry, and that the forms which 
they take as they approach simplicity are more ^nd more 
intangible, imponderable, and invisible. 

Sir William Thomson, perhaps one of the profoundest 
students of nature living, and one who in the application 
of mathematics to the solution of the deepest problems 
of science certainly has no known equal, has put forth a 
theory of the ultimate constitution of matter, in which 
he assumes that the material atoms consist of vortex 
rings in the universal ether, inconceivably small but simi- 
lar to the rings which smokers take pleasure in puffing 
from their lips, and which also may often be seen escap- 
ing from the smoke-stack of a motionless but puffing 
locomotive. 

Such rings are formed in air and gases by friction 
against the edges of the opening from which they escape, 
but in a perfect fluid there could be no friction, and in 
such a fluid Sir William Thomson has mathematically 
demonstrated that no material agency could ever create 
such rings, and that, if once existing, no material agency 
could destroy them, but they w r ould exist forever. Fur- 
ther than this, he has shown by experiments with such 



THE UNSEEN" UNIVERSE. 9 

rings in still-air boxes and by mathematical corrections 
to fit them to the perfect fluid assumed, that such rings, 
in the few cases that could be used in comparison, actu- 
ally would and do behave toward each other as the atoms 
of matter do. 

This is but a theory; however, together with the in- 
dications of the compound nature of the elements, it does 
go * to show that the tendencies of scientific research 
point toward the conclusion that matter as known to 
chemistry and physics is but a modified form of the uni- 
versal ether. If, in the light of increasing knowledge, this 
proves true, which the science of the day pronounces 
probable, then matter is made of ether, and the power 
that made it can reduce it to ether again ; and though 
the evidence of this yet falls short of a demonstration, 
nevertheless it is the best light that science has to offer 
on the subject of the ultimate constitution of matter. 
This is to say that the best indications of physical science 
point to the conclusion that " the things which are seen 
are temporal, but the things which are not seen are 
eternal." Neither is the truth of this conclusion de- 
pendent on the compound nature of the elements — that is, 
on whether there are intermediate forms or not between 
those in which they are known to chemistry and the 
ether, for, of those who have searched into their nature 
most closely, some of the most eminent have said that 
the atoms, whether simple or compound, bear very much 
the marks of manufactured articles. 

This universal ether, What is it ? Invisible, impon- 
derable, intangible, as spirit itself, our senses do not put 
us in any relation with it, and we cannot even guess its 
possibilities. Only indirectly by the aid of the most spir- 
itual of our senses, sight, are we aware of its existence. 
We can study the qualities of light, and when we become 



10 THE MISSING SENSE. 

aware that light is a tremor, and we study the character 
of its pulsations, the reason perceives the necessary exist- 
ence of the substance that trembles, the medium that 
transmits this tremor through space to us. Otherwise the 
existence of the ether would never be suspected, 

That this ether can thrill with such a tremor is a slight 
revelation of its nature. From these short, sharp, and 
inconceivably quick pulsations, and from the fact that 
their motion is across and not along the line of the ray, 
we know that this ether fills space full as no form of mat- 
ter fills it. Matter is more or less dense, but in no form 
so dense that it could not be denser. There are spaces 
between the molecules of matter, but there is no such 
space unoccupied in the substance of the ether, or vastly 
less if any. Some of our hardest solids, as tempered 
steel, are capable of vibrating in a similar manner to the 
ether, but judged by this characteristic, the ether is 
vastly harder, solider, and denser than the hardest solid 
we know. It is, however, the lack of the qualities of 
matter, rather than the qualities which it manifests, that 
makes the ether so incomprehensible to us. All matter 
offers resistance to pressure and requires force to put it 
in motion or to cause motion of another substance in it. 
But the ether offers no resistance. Even in the case of 
a comet, which may be so light that its weight bears no 
measurable relation to that of the lightest of planetary 
bodies, and which is moving through the ether with a 
velocity greater than that of any planet, there is no evi- 
dence of any resistance to its motion by the ether through 
which it moves. The retardation which has been ob- 
served in such cases, is sufficiently accounted for by the 
comet's proximity to other bodies, or its actual contact 
with material substances. The ether behaves toward 
matter as if matter had no existence. Matter does not 



THE UNSEEN UNIVERSE. 11 

seem to exclude the ether from the space which it occu- 
pies ; we cannot in any way make an ether vacuum either 
partial or complete, and in solids so constituted that they 
are transparent, the vibrations of light in their substance 
bespeak the presence of the ether there as if the matter 
were absent. Keciprocally matter in motion goes about 
its business as if the ether had no existence. Ether and 
matter seem to bear no discoverable relation to each 
other. 

All "matter has weight. It is by this quality that we 
estimate its quantity, even in the most delicate researches 
of chemistry. We cannot know whether the ether has 
weight or not, because, as we cannot isolate any portion of 
it, nor shut it out from any space, nor change the density 
of any part of it, it must support its own pressure every- 
where perfectly in every direction. However, since the 
ether fills all space, and space can have no boundaries, it 
can have no centre of gravity, and, therefore, presumably 
no weight. Or, from another point of view, it is as if 
every assignable place were its exact centre of gravity, and 
gravitation must therefore in that place act equally in all 
directions whence as before there could be no weight. 
Another consideration, however, makes it seem almost 
certain that gravitation is not a property of the ether, 
even if we could isolate a portion of it and its mass were 
finite — that is, that if it were, then the weight of the 
planets and stars would be blended with that of the ether, 
and their gravity could not act upon each other as it does 
directly as the mass and inversely as the square of the 
distance, as if the ether did not exist. But this is pure 
speculation. Our senses do not put us in relation to the 
ether, do not allow us to examine it, nevertheless its ex- 
istence is not in any sense doubtful, it is real, and we are 
sure of it. 



12 THE MISSING SENSE. 

Let it be noticed here that in all matters of external 
observation our knowledge comes to us through the 
senses, and that there are three elements involved in 
the reality and truthfulness of the knowledge so acquired. 
First, there are properties or qualities of something ex- 
ternal to ourselves, of which we become aware ; second, 
there is an adaptation of our physical constitution to per- 
ceive these qualities, which adaptation is the sense ; third, 
there is an intelligence within, which receives and takes 
notice of what the senses communicate. The reality of 
the external qualities, or of the substance to which they 
pertain, is in no way dependent on the intelligence that 
perceives them, certainly not on the physical adaptation 
of man's body to perceive these qualities. The sense is 
the bridge which connects us with what is external to 
us. We receive the knowledge that our senses stand 
ready to convey to us only as we direct our intelligent at- 
tention to the senses which are to communicate it. 

We often gaze absently out on the world and are not 
for the time aware of the picture which the light is 
painting on our retina ; under the excitement of battle 
the soldier may be wounded without knowing when the 
wound is received. We are aware of but very few of 
the innumerable audible sounds which reach our ears. 
Without the attention, our senses are like the telegraph- 
wires clicking away their message when the receiving 
operator is absent, we are none the wiser for the im- 
pressions they convey. The amount of knowledge our 
senses may give us depends quite as much on the degree 
of trained intelligent attention which we give to their 
messages as on the fineness and perfection of the senses 
themselves, but without the existence of the senses the 
attention could perceive nothing. 

Scientific knowledge has greatly increased of late years 



THE UNSEEN UNIVERSE. 13 

in regard to external realities which our senses are adapt- 
ed to perceive, but as we have observed, these realities 
would exist the same if our senses had not been adapted 
to perceive them, and science has, in the ether, found 
one reality that has no qualities to which our senses are 
adapted, except the one quality of transmitting the vi- 
brations of light. 

There are other realities which, like the ether, our 
senses do not put us in relation with. Some of them are 
of the greatest importance, and intimately near to us. 
Here and there we can touch them in some second- 
handed way. Something that comes to our understand- 
ing implies their reality. Some truth could not be true 
and they not be real. Yet because our senses cannot 
grasp them, because we cannot manipulate, bottle up, 
weigh, and examine their substance, the school of ma- 
terialists denies their existence. 

Ever since the American Revolution the story has 
been current that when Major Andre was tried as a spy 
before General Washington's court-martial, his sister in 
England saw or became aware of that trial in a dream. 
We are told that she described the court-room, its furni- 
ture, its occupants, and their positions to her companions, 
at the time the trial was in progress, with as much mi- 
nuteness and accuracy as would have been possible if she 
had been bodily present there. All this,' weeks before 
the slow-sailing vessels, the only means of communica- 
tion across the ocean at the time, could bring her the 
news which proved the vision true. The late Professor 
Joseph Haven, of Amherst, and afterward of Chicago, 
has referred to this story in his text-book on Mental 
Philosophy, remarking, however, that he knows not on 
how good authority it rests. It belongs to a class of 
phenomena rare enough to cause remark and to excite 



14 THE MISSING SENSE. 

wonder, but common enough .for very many, perhaps 
most people, to be aware of instances the authenticity 
of which they do not doubt. When anything of this 
kind occurs the motive does not usually exist to lead to 
its immediate publication, but it is usually spoken of 
quietly to intimate friends. If sufficiently remarkable 
to serve a purpose, it may long afterward be alluded to 
by other persons in print, having passed through a tradi- 
tional period first. If there were no other instances 
known of similar facts, the suspicion might be justified 
that it was a creation of fancy, but as it is, being an in- 
stance of a class of phenomena whose reality is well 
known, the story is worthy of credence. 

An example of similar unexplained consciousness of 
things at a distance has come to the writer's knowledge 
at second hand only through a perfectly trustworthy 
channel. This is of a sea-captain's wife, whose con- 
sciousness followed her husband in his ship all over the 
earth and made her very frequently aware of his condi- 
tion and occupation. An instance of this which occurred 
while her husband was at home will make the nature of 
this communication as plain, perhaps, as anything could. 
The captain had excused himself and remained at home 
one Sunday while his wife went to church. During the 
service, while she was resting her head on the back of the 
next pew, she' became aware that her husband was rub- 
bing something with his hand. She did not know what 
it was, but when she reached home she questioned him 
and found that he had been polishing a sea-bean. The 
fact that he was doing this slyly, the act at that time 
-being contrary to his wife's notions of propriety, seemed 
to be the cause of its impressing her consciousness. 

For another instance of this kind of consciousness of 
things distant, and of which I am at liberty to state the 



THE UXSEEN UNIVERSE. 15 

evidence to establish its truth, I am indebted to Profes- 
sor R. C. Davis, Librarian of Michigan University, who 
learned of the fact while on a visit to the New England 
seaboard during the summer of 1886. Professor Davis 
having written to his informant, Captain George Fisher, 
of Osterville, Barnstable County, Mass., for the particu- 
lars, received the following : 

" On November 13th, 1837, while in the Indian 
Ocean, whaling, in latitude 33° 12 7 south, longitude 73° 
east, on board the bark Malay, of Salem, Captain Ed- 
ward Barnard, of Nantucket, master, George Fisher, 
third mate, fell from the main top-gallant yard and 
struck in the larboard quarter boat, falling sixty-six 
feet. His mother, Abbie Fisher, of Nantucket, in a 
dream saw him fall and gave a cry in her sleep. His 
father said to her ' What is the matter ?' waking her, 
and she said, ' George has just had a fall.' She set it 
down in the old Farmers' Almanac — Eobert B. Thomas' 
Almanac— and it proved to be just the same date or time 
that he fell. George Fisher." 

The George Fisher who is authority for this story is 
the same man who fell from the main top-gallant yard 
in the middle of the Indian Ocean in 1837, and Profes- 
sor Davis vouches for his trustworthiness, and that he has 
the records mentioned. Professor Davis first became 
aware of this incident in a conversation with Captain 
Fisher in regard to the custom which had prevailed in 
his family for several generations, of noting down in the 
almanac mentioned anything which they wished to keep 
on record, or which, at the time of its occurrence, seemed 
to them remarkable. Captain Fisher said that he had 
these almanacs on file from near the beginning of the 
present century, and mentioned one entry as curious, it 



16 THE MISSING SENSE. 

being the record of a dream in which his mother had 
seen him fall, and, as she told his father at the time, break 
in the side of a boat and break his ribs, which injuries, 
as then stated, were inflicted both on the man and the 
boat. 

Instances of this peculiar consciousness of things at a 
distance are not rare, but, possibly because they are felt 
to border on the ghostly, and because the science of the 
age, which is commonly thought to sweep the whole uni- 
verse in its range, offers no explanation of them, they 
are usually passed by, and left out of the catalogue of 
facts to be scientifically considered ; we seldom hear 
them mentioned, and read of them yet more rarely. As 
a recent writer has remarked : u The ghost and his kin- 
dred have declined in the estimation of the people. The 
growing intelligence of the age has caused the people to 
no longer care to talk or read about them as they once 
did, and they no longer half -believe in them." This is 
true, and the world is to be congratulated on being so 
well rid of the grotesque fancies with which ignorance 
used to frighten it, but if with so much of the false 
something of the true is also placed under the ban it is 
not well. Phenomena of the class we are considering 
are facts, and to ignore a fact is disloyalty to truth and 
treason to science itself. We do not understand facts of 
this order, but evidence is not wanting to prove that they 
are real. It may not often happen that an instance oc- 
curs of such consciousness of things across an ocean, but 
who has not known instances where one mind has been 
impressed by another without the medium of speech or 
sign ? My wife sometimes becomes aware of my thought 
without my uttering or acting it. I see a person in a 
distant part of an audience whom I fancy to be an old 
acquaintance, and watching him I soon attract his atten- 



THE UNSEED UNIVERSE. 17 

tion. Again, I feel a restless inclination to turn round 
because I feel myself watched from behind. Such phe- 
nomena are so common that they can be paralleled in the 
experience of most people, yet they are all of the same 
kind with the vision of Major Andre's sister, or the tell- 
tale consciousness of the sea-captain's wife.* 

* This matter was originally written in January, 1886. Since that 
time the labors of the Society for Psychical Research, London, Eng- 
land, have resulted in the accumulation of a vast amount of evidence 
bearing on the matters here discussed. 

In a work under the title " Phantasms of the Living," by E. Gur- 
ney, F. W. H. Myers, and F. Podmore, published under the auspices 
of that society, more than seven hundred well-authenticated in- 
stances of appearances and communications all closely coincident 
with distant realities, and selected according to rigid rules of evi- 
dence which would have excluded all the cases that we have used 
unless it be the George Fisher incident, have been collected, classi- 
fied, and discussed, together with a large amount of experimental 
work. The result is summed up thus : 

" The main theses of this work, which its authors consider estab- 
lished, are : 

" 1. Experiment proves that telepathy, the supersensuous trans- 
ference of thoughts and feelings from one mind to another, is a fact 
in nature. 

" 2. Testimony proves that phantasms, impressions, voices, or fig- 
ures of persons undergoing some crisis, especially death, are perceived 
by their friends and relatives with a frequency which chance cannot 
explain. 

" 3. These phantasms are instances of the supersensory action of 
one mind on another." 

It hardly need be said that no effort has been made in this book to 
collect evidence of this kind, but only to give instances enough and 
of a kind to convey a clear understanding of the nature of the facts 
on which our argument is founded, the diffused consciousuess of 
their reality which prevails being thought sufficient with this illus- 
tration to found the argument upon. The collection and discussion 
of evidence, though perhaps necessary to give a proper scientific 
standing to our argument, is not the purpose of this book. This work 
has now been done, however, and well done, by the society above 
mentioned, and a broad basis of evidence has been established thereby 



P THE MISSING SENSE. 

These facts imply that the mind is capable of receiv- 
ing impressions from and making impressions on others 
at a distance, in some manner not understood, through 
some medium that our senses do not put us in relation 
with, and which, therefore, we cannot avail ourselves of 
at will. 

We seem to be most susceptible to such influences 
when most passive. The vigilance that fits us for our 
duties in relation with material things, which puts our 
senses on the alert and fixes our attention on the impres- 
sions that are conveyed to our understanding through 
them, which puts body and mind in gear with our will 
to do our bidding, this throws us out of range of these 
occult influences, but if we had a sense that put us in re- 
lation with this medium and this manner of communica- 
tion, so that we could use them at will, then vigilant at- 
tention would make these communications perfect instead 
of putting us out of their range. The reality of such 
communications and of their medium is not affected by 
the fact that we have no such sense. 

Whether passive or active, voluntary or involuntary, 
such impressions could not be given nor received if the 
spiritual capacity to give and receive them and the 
medium of communication through which they are given 



under our argument that the universe and ourselves are equipped 
for the use of a missing sense. 

The language adopted by the authors of the work referred to will 
no doubt be generally adopted. Communication to one mind with- 
out sensible means, of the ideas and perceptions of another, is telep- 
athy. The perception of distant things and events, so far as they 
may not be communicated from an intelligence present with them, is 
clairvoyance, a use of language which is not new, but a distinction 
from telepathy which it is well to make, though the constitution of 
the universe which adapts it to the play of the one faculty may as 
easily fit it for the other. 



THE UNSEED UNIVERSE. 19 

and received did not exist. We have as much right to 
consider the existence of such a power and such a medium 
certain as we have to consider certain the existence of 
the ether or of matter. 

As in the case of the ether, science has learned some- 
thing of its nature from the study of light, the only fact 
that we can study in which that ether surely plays its 
part, so in case of this nameless reality let us learn what 
we can of its nature from the facts we have to study in 
which it is concerned. In cases of consciousness of 
things at a distance similar to those cited there are two 
conceivable modes of action. 

1. It might possibly be true that the spiritual person 
departs from the body which is yet left alive, and be- 
takes itself to. the presence of the scenes of which it be- 
comes conscious. 

If this explanation were accepted, the existence of con- 
scious intelligence, of the person, apart from its material 
embodiment would be granted, and the falsity of the 
materialistic philosophy established by the fact. 

But, since this would imply a division of the spiritual 
person which feels itself to be indivisible, a part being 
left behind to continue the functions of life, or that there 
are two or more separable spiritual natures in each con- 
scious, intelligent person, an hypothesis which there is 
no other reason for supposing true, or else that the 
principle of life is not spiritual which we shall show rea- 
son to believe false, this explanation is probably not true. 

Moreover, since cases of this consciousness of distant 
things occur in fits of absent-mindedness, without pro- 
found unconsciousness of bodily surroundings or even 
sleep, and since analogous facts occur without the sus- 
pension of ordinary vigilance even, the probability be- 
comes almost a certainty that this explanation is false. 



20 THE MISSING SENSE, 

2. The intelligence, the spiritual person, that experi- 
ences this consciousness of distant things may remain 
located in the living body, while this consciousness is 
received through the agency of some medium external to 
itself and some spiritual adaptation in itself to this 
medium, which medium and adaptation would be more 
analogous to light and the sense of sight than to anything 
else within the range of our common and sensible experi- 
ence. And as the other hypothesis is probably false, the 
probability is as strong that this is true. 

On this assumption let us try to see what possibilities 
are implied. Our one sense, that gives us information of 
things at a distance, sight, is very imperfect. Accord- 
ing to the laws of perspective, objects vanish into imper- 
ceptible points very quickly as they recede from us. 
But in the case of Major Andre's sister, the minute de- 
tails of the scene that was passing three thousand miles 
from her on the other side of the Atlantic were as clear 
as if she had been bodily present there. 

As in this case so in others. Wherever we find in- 
stances of the manifestation of this possible faculty we 
find indications that neither distance nor intervening ob- 
jects are any hindrance to it, and that probably no time 
is consumed in transmitting the communication. It fol- 
lows that if we had a sense that could make this possi- 
bility available to us, it would excel the sense of sight 
in the amount and value of the information it would 
convey to us as much as, or more than, the sense of sight 
excels that of feeling. As we have no such sense, of 
course the indirect, imperfect way in which such influ- 
ences can reach us does not allow us to acquire any new 
ideas, nor to add to our stock of knowledge through this 
channel, but could we have such a sense, we are not now 
able to guess what hidden things of the minute, of the 



THE UNSEEN" UNIVERSE. 21 

inaccessible, of the invisible, of the incomprehensible 
even, it would reveal to us, what a mighty instrument of 
knowledge it would be. 

The class of experiences which we have been consider- 
ing, which for want of a definite name w T e must call con- 
sciousness of things at a distance, sometimes affects our 
dreams. 

Doubtless we are influenced in this way most freely in 
our sleep, the attention to things affecting our physical 
senses being then most thoroughly off guard ; but on these 
occasions there is the same difficulty in recalling the de- 
tails when we return to wakefulness that occurs in or- 
dinary dreams. The experiences that occur while their 
subject is awake are apt to be more precisely recalled, 
and to that extent more valuable for study. Let us, how- 
ever, take notice of the fact that our minds in sleep are 
susceptible to influences that are not wholly subjective, 
but which come from sources having external reality at 
the time they are received, and which do not come from 
impressions on the physical senses misinterpreted by the 
fancy unguided by judgment. 

The usually accepted physical theory of dreams is that 
they consist of memories disconnected from their proper 
relations with other things, set together by an unguided 
fancy or influenced by slight impressions through the 
physical senses ; that except as such impressions through 
the senses influence them they are wholly subjective. 

But not all of dreams can be thus explained ; perhaps 
they are rather the exceptional features that can be. 

There are many people who attach to dreams mysteri- 
ous import, who feel that they often bear hidden mean- 
ing in relation to themselves that would be important if 
it could be understood ; more of such than are willing 
to avow the fact, for many people who feel this impres- 



22 THE MISSING SENSE. 

sion most deeply believe at the same time that it is a 
baseless superstition, or, at least, that others would think 
so if it were known- that they entertained such feelings, 

One may, however, in a true scientific spirit study his 
own experiences and learn from them what he can of 
their import. He cannot by any possibility study so 
well the dreams of others for this purpose, because that 
import may so largely depend on the adaptation of such 
dreams to the inmost consciousness of the dreamer, to 
his history, and the motives that have guided him as 
they cannot be known to others, as he could not by any 
effort make them known to those even who are most 
intimately acquainted with him. 

Here, then, the writer must appeal to his own experi- 
ence, and from this evidence we can say that some 
dreams are remarkable for their imagery. They are 
beautifully ingenious pictorial rebuses unmistakably ap- 
plicable to the facts of life. Some of such in types and 
figures have portrayed the past and, as subsequent events 
have proved, to some extent the future. They have por- 
trayed the deepest motives and purposes and the most 
private experiences of life as they could have been known 
to none but the dreamer, and that in a manner as foreign 
to his own mental habit as anything possibly could be ; 
as in his waking hours by any effort of his own he never 
could have pictured them ; but in these dreams this im- 
agery comes to him without effort and without forethought 
or warning. The habit of the dreamer's mind is to 
think in words, but in these experiences, without any 
effort of his own, the thought is portrayed in pictures, or 
rather by the seeming of things and events. Not only is 
this without effort on his part, but it is without the slight- 
est anticipation of what is coming, each new scene strik- 
ing him with the freshness of surprise. The thought it- 



THE UNSEED UKIVERSE. 23 

self does not enter the dreamer's mind, until in his 
waking hours he reviews the panorama of his dream, and 
the interpretation forces itself upon him. The dreams 
of Joseph as recorded in Genesis more nearly correspond 
with these than any other examples that could be men- 
tioned. The fact that these scriptural examples are 
familiar in their relation to the events which they portray 
makes them more valuable as instances of their class 
than any dreams from the writer's experience could be, 
though the latter serve the purpose of affording to him 
indubitable evidence that such dream imagery is fact and 
not fiction or myth. 

In order that such a dream should have the force to 
the reader which it properly and necessarily has to the 
dreamer, it would be necessary that the dreamer's life in 
all the relations depicted should be as well known to the 
reader as to the dreamer himself ; but this is impossible ; 
therefore, while we use our own dreams as a basis for our 
discussion, it would be worse than useless to relate the 
dreams themselves. We can but state their character as 
a class, and cite the reader to similar dreams which are 
familiar as examples. How often the experience of 
others afford examples of this class of dreams striking 
enough to be recognized as such with certainty, the 
writer cannot know ; we fear that they are rare ; but their 
reality in his own case he cannot doubt. 

Let us beg the reader not to do as we fear many will — 
namely, rummage his own memory for examples of such 
dreams as he may have had, and try the writer's argu- 
ment by what he finds there. If such dreams as we are 
discussing are among the reader's experiences, the force 
of our argument will be strengthened to him by the fact ; 
but if, as probably is the case, they are not, we beg the 
reader to try our argument by the facts that we have 



24 THE MISSING SENSE. 

based it on, and not attempt to draw our conclusions 
from the basis of his own experience and, failing to jus- 
tify them, set aside the conclusions as invalid. 

In that class of dreams, then, which are unmistakably 
imagery we have another fact for study. Referring to 
one of the best marked of these dreams in the writer's 
experience, which occurred several years ago, and was 
written out on waking, as a type of its class, it was either 
a panorama constructed without law or guidance out of 
disconnected impressions stored in the brain of the 
dreamer, or it was given and guided by the influence of 
some intelligence not himself. 

The first hypothesis is one that cannot be entertained. 
That one instance of such a dream, whose imagery por- 
trayed the past and the future, should occur without other 
cause than the law of chance, is a supposition too im- 
probable to be seriously entertained ; but when, as is the 
fact, such dreams occur repeatedly, with new imagery 
on each occasion, and portray facts which at the time 
are not known to the dreamer, and which, as often is the 
case, are impending in the near future, the first hypothe- 
sis may be dismissed as impossible. The alternative re- 
mains that such dreams are due to the influence of some 
intelligence other than the dreamer. 

What, then, and where that intelligence can be, be- 
comes a question of some interest for our study. 

What has been said in relation to consciousness of 
things at a distance, and to the influence which one mind 
sometimes has over another without the medium of 
speech or sign, may give us some idea of the possibility 
of receiving such impressions as these from an outside 
influence. But, as these dreams are in the nature of the 
case imagery and not a sort of perception of physical 
realities or occurrences happening in some distant place, 



THE UXSEEST UKIVERSE. 25 

imagery being necessarily mental, it follows that they are 
more or less perfect reproductions of what is passing in 
the mind which is the source of this influence. Also, 
since this imagery refers to the life of the dreamer and 
to matters of interest to him chiefly, it follows that the 
mind, which is the source of these impressions, is not that 
of a stranger, but is intimately acquainted with him, more 
so than his most intimate acquaintances and members 
of his own family are or can be. And, as this imagery 
sweeps the future as well as the past, and collates the 
distant with the near, the range of the intelligence 
from which it proceeds is superhuman. From all of 
these facts it follows that, whether terrestrial, celestial, 
or infernal in its origin, the intelligence that inspires 
such dreams as these is not clothed in flesh and blood, 
but is one whose embodiment, if embodied at all, is such 
that, like the ether, our physical senses do not put us in 
any relation to it. 

To the writer this is a demonstration of the existence 
of conscious and intelligent spirits not clothed in flesh 
and blood, and the materialistic hypothesis that con- 
sciousness and intelligence are impossible, except as a 
result of the present action of the processes of life in. 
a delicately constructed physical organization, and that 
the death of the body is necessarily the end of conscious 
intelligence, and personal existence is overthrown. If 
the experience of the writer could be transferred with 
the thoughts expressed, the demonstration would be 
final to every reader ; but this cannot be.* The usual 

* Dreams of this class seem to have no place in modern thought. 
That their occurrence was taken for granted by the ancient Hebrews 
is shown by the instances we have mentioned as examples, and by 
others spoken of in the Old Testament. Of course without modern 
instances this fact is no evidence of their reality ; but the modern 



26 - THE MISSING SENSE. 

metaphysical arguments from consciousness, of the in- 
divisibility, continuous identity, non-identity with the 
body, and power over it, of the ego, and from these 
facts of consciousness, its spirituality and immortality 
are good, legitimate, and, when comprehended, conclu- 
sive proofs of the same truths, which by this road are 
brought home to our own persons instead of to intelli- 
gences other than ourselves ; but, as these arguments are 
commonly familiar, we drop them with the allusion. 

There are, however, other necessary truths of value 
involved in the experience which we have recited. 
Since, as we have seen, the influence which inspires such 
dreams must necessarily come from an intelligence not 
embodied in flesh, and imperceptible to our senses, and 
since the character of the impressions received shows an 
exceedingly intimate acquaintance on the part of such 
intelligences with us, it follows that the barrier which 
separates us from them does not exist on the other side 
to separate them from us. It implies an imperfection in 
our organization that does not exist in theirs, and that 
their ability to become acquainted with us exceeds our 

instances are supplied in the writer's case by his own experience, and 
so far as this link in our chain of argument is concerned we must 
rest the case on our personal testimony. We think that those who 
fait to reach with us the conclusions at which we have arrived, must 
do so by doubting the correctness of our judgment in regard to the 
character of these dreams ; but this we cannot help. We hope that 
the publication of this experience may attract attention to the subject 
in such a manner that evidence may be accumulated in regard to it, 
though doubtless it is a subject to which the application of rigid- 
rules of evidence will be difficult. If, however, the Society for 
Psychical Research or some other body having facilities equal to 
theirs will turn its attention to the subject, perhaps in the end the 
reality of such dreams may be established on a basis of cumulative 
evidence as broad and strong as that for the reality of spontaneous 
telepathy has now become. 



THE U^SEE^ UNIVERSE. 27 

ability to become acquainted with each other, even when 
we mutually desire to know each other and to make our- 
selves known to each other as thoroughly as possible. 

Such an acquaintance with us as this does not necessarily 
imply a long and intimate companionship with us on the 
part of the intelligence that influences and inspires such 
dreams. We have seen before that the universe and our 
own personality are provided for the possibility of a sense 
which we do not possess, which, if we had it, would make 
us aware of the thoughts of others and of things that are 
invisible and inaccessible to us, without regard to distance 
or intervening objects. It is entirely probable that such 
a sense, if we had it, would make our acquaintance with 
each other instantaneous and complete, as it never is or 
can be complete under our present conditions. The past 
exists in our present, in our memories, and in the char- 
acters that we have acquired, and it is probable that the 
past as well as the present of each one would be open to 
the understanding of all w^ho possessed this sense, and 
that a secret of any kind would be impossible. It is 
probable, too, that intelligences, persons, living in and re- 
lated to the unseen universe possess this sense, and that 
our material organization, with the imperfections neces- 
sarily pertaining to our physical senses, is the barrier that 
stands between us and the possession of it ourselves. In 
this case the momentary attention to ourselves of any 
intelligence belonging to, and living in, this universe of 
the unseen, whether it were good or evil, would give that 
intelligence all the acquaintance with us that these im- 
pressions imply. 

Let us review briefly what we have done. We have 
seen, in the first place, that physical science as interpreted 
by its foremost teachers points to the conclusion that the 
gross matter it deals with is not the original, nor neees- 



28 THE MISSING SENSE. 

sarily the final form of substantial existence, but that it 
is formed from something which science cannot reach, 
and being formed from that unknown, invisible some- 
thing, may return to it again. We have seen that science 
recognizes the existence of such an invisible and intan- 
gible substance as universally present in the ether, which 
does not conform to any of the laws by which matter is 
recognized, with which our senses do not put us in any 
relation, but which fills the universe, nevertheless, in a 
manner very real and with possibilities beyond our power 
to guess. This is an unseen universe, but, so far, with- 
out indication of life or intelligence. Thus far we have 
followed physical science in the strictest manner as ex- 
pounded by those who are recognized as its best teachers. 
Beyond this, in considering the phenomena of intelli- 
gence, we have passed into a field which science has 
neglected, but we have confined ourselves to the study of 
facts by the strictest scientific methods — methods which, 
from the necessities of the case, however, bear more re- 
lation to those of mathematics than to those of chemistry 
or physics ; and we have been forced, by the phenomena 
of consciousness of things at a distance, and of the influ- 
ence of mind over mind without speech or sign, to con- 
clude that the five physical senses by which we are put 
in relation with things do not exhaust the number of 
media or influences or qualities which have existence in 
the universe, and to which senses might possibly corre- 
spond. We are forced to the conclusion that the imper- 
fection is in our physical organization and not in the 
organization of the universe, which prevents our having 
exact and minute knowledge at will of things distant, 
inaccessible, intangible, and invisible to us now. Fur- 
ther than this we have recognized, in facts certified to us 
bf our own consciousness, influences which must neces- 



THE UNSEED UNIVERSE. 29 

sarily have proceeded from intelligences not ourselves, 
and which, in the nature of the case, must be in a condi- 
tion invisible, intangible, imperceptible to our physical 
senses. We had discovered the reality of an unseen uni- 
verse before, now we have discovered that it is peopled 
with life and intelligence. And we have appealed to 
physical science and to its authorities, consciousness and 
the reason, only ; authorities which seem to us the only 
ones on which the mind can rest with confidence, but 
which theologians generally, as well as many scientists, 
including the whole school of materialists, have insisted 
were not able to reveal to us these truths. 

In speaking of the barrier that separates us from the 
unseen, we have repeatedly used the expression that our 
senses do not put us in relation to it. Let us try to get 
a clearer conception of what this may mean. 

It is conceivable that the human race might exist with- 
out the sense of sight. Under this condition we may 
suppose the intelligence of man to be as great as it is 
now. The other senses having to be depended on for 
all communication with things outside of himself would, 
of course, be cultivated to an acuteness which they do not 
now have, but the universe to man would be what he 
could find out by feeling, reinforced to a slight extent by 
hearing, tasting, and smelling. Through these senses 
man would exchange thoughts with his fellow-men. It 
is conceivable that under such conditions the material 
progress of civilization might have been attained much 
as it has been under existing conditions. Railroads, 
telegraphs, and steamships, possibly, might be used as 
now. Time would naturally divide itself into days and 
seasons distinguished from each other by their tempera- 
ture and the prevailing conditions of life, and also in the 
case of day and night, by the comparative activity of 



30 THE MISSING SENSE. 

nature in the daytime and the quiet of the night. Man 
would use fire, and recognize its presence at some dis- 
tance by its warmth, but it would not shine to him. 
Likewise he might get some sort of an idea of the exist- 
ence of the sun as a fire to which the earth is exposed in 
the day and withdrawn from in the night, but except as 
an inaccessible fire of variable intensity, which would be 
a mistake, he could know nothing of it, while the exist- 
ence of the moon, the planets and the stars would never 
be suspected. All the minute knowledge of things at a 
distance, and all knowledge of minute things, which we 
gain through sight, would be inconceivable to the race. 
All the delights which we get from light and color and 
beauty would have for man no existence. * The concep- 
tion of distance in space would itself be very feeble, all 
man's ideas of space being derived from distance travel- 
led over, and never expanded by distances seen. Culti- 
vated as well as the other senses might be and would be, 
with sight lacking it would be but a poor universe with 
which man could become acquainted, compared with that 
which now comes within the range of his perceptions. 

Yet in this case man w r ould never suspect that he 
lacked anything. Light for him would have no exist- 
ence, and he could have no desire for a sense with which 
to perceive and use it. He would not have the cause to 
desire such a sense which we have to desire a sense that 
would put us in relation w T ith the ether and with pure 
spirit, because he could not even suspect its existence. 
Those effects of light which would put him in indirect 
relation to it would all be ascribed to the heat which he 
could perceive, and he could no more desire a sense to 
perceive the light than we can desire a sense to per- 
ceive some possible agent for which we know no place 
and have not a name nor an idea. 



■THE- UNSEEN UNIVERSE. 31 

Yet in this case light would be an agent in the uni- 
verse as real, as potent as it is now. What a revelation 
it would be to such a race if they could suddenly be pro- 
vided with the sense of sight ! Just as in the case sup- 
posed, it is with us now. There are facts in the universe 
which our senses no more put us in relation with than a 
blind race would be put in relation with light. And as 
in the case of the blind race so with us, another sense, 
or other senses, could reveal to us a universe as much 
transcending that which we now know, as that transcends 
the universe which might be known to a blind race. 
And that universe is real now, and we are living in it, 
just as a blind race might live and not know it in a uni- 
verse all sharing and glowing with light and beauty 



CHAPTER II. 



SPIRIT. 



Thus far the evidence is complete and satisfactory. 
The conclusions may be summed up in this : 1. There is a 
universe transcending that which is observed by our 
physical senses and known to physical science, in which 
the laws that characterize matter do not hold. This, so 
far as it is non-living, in the absence of particular in- 
formation, we may assume to be the ether. 

2. This universe is inhabited by intelligent persons 
who, being in relation to, and components of, this tran- 
scendent non-material universe, are not perceptible by the 
senses which put us in relation with matter. Such be- 
ings the world has agreed to call spirits. 

3. There is that in man which is capable of receiving 
influences that can emanate only from intelligences in the 
world of spirits, and, further, influences are given and 
received between living human intelligences in a manner 
which transcends the laws of the material universe, and 
which shows a qualification in us to use, and a possibil- 
ity in the universe to. give scope to, a sense which we do 
not possess, which sense might put us in relation with 
the world of spirits and the ether. 

4. The intelligence of man, the ego, the man himself, 
is spirit and not matter. 

The direct evidence of this is metaphysical from in- 
trospection, and has been referred to but not followed out 
in this work. The indirect evidence, the necessary in- 



SPIRIT. 33 

ductions which have been followed, from external facts 
of which consciousness is the witness, is, however, such 
as to make the same truth not only probable but almost 
certain. 

5. We are open to the perceptions of spirits as they 
are not to ours. 

In considering the truths stated in the first three of 
these conclusions, it will be well to bear in mind, in regard 
to the relations of objects in the unseen universe to each 
other, that though these non-material and spiritual ob- 
jects offer no resistance to our touch, no obstacle to the 
light which we see, and no quality that any of our senses 
can perceive, yet this fact does not imply any lack of sub- 
stantiality in these objects as related to each other. 

Spirit and the ether offer no resistance to matter, and 
conversely we have evidence that matter offers no resist- 
ance to the ether. AYe may safely assume also that it 
offers no resistance to spirit. 

Ail this is relative. To persons on a rapidly moving 
railway -train all the world seems to be rushing by while 
they sit still, so in this case while all the universe of the 
ether and of spirit seems to us who are in relation with 
matter to be emptiness and unsubstantiality, it may be, 
and probably is true, that the emptiness and unsubstan- 
tiality are on our side, and that the universe of the unseen 
is full and varied and substantial, and real in a measure 
surpassing all that we know. 

Of the fourth conclusion the metaphysical evidence 
we take to be as conclusive and unimpeachable as is pos- 
sible to the human mind. We value the indirect evi- 
dence, however, especially, because this writing is an 
effort to argue these questions to a class of minds which 
have been trained to ignore metaphysics as inconclusive 
and misleading. That indirect evidence may be reduced 



34 THE MISSING SENSE. 

to a syllogism the premises of which are established, thus : 
Intelligences exist apart from a material body, man is an 
intelligence, therefore man may exist apart from a ma- 
terial body. The only missing link in the proof that 
man does so exist is the evidence to prove that all intel- 
ligences, and not a class of them only, are capable of 
existing apart from a material envelope. But when the 
actual existence of intelligence apart from a material 
body is seen to be proved, we do not think any one can 
doubt but the intelligence of man so exists. The doubt 
of man's immortality has always been intrenched in the 
materialistic hypothesis, but the evidence for the over- 
throw of that hypothesis is complete, and with the over- 
throw of that hypothesis the doubt must vanish. Fur- 
thermore, the step from the recognition of the truth that 
there are intelligences which are spirits, to the conclusion 
that all intelligences are spirits, is not a long one. 

Possibly there may be some direct external evidence 
of the spiritual nature of man and of his continued ex- 
istence after the death of the body, but unfortunately 
whatever evidence of this kind may exist has fallen into 
disrepute because of its association with fraud. 

Of course, from the use made of the word when we 
stated that thinkers are divided into materialists and spir- 
itualists, and from what has followed, it would not be 
suspected that we had any reference to that misguided 
sect which has assumed to appropriate as its name a word 
which the world needs for its philosophical uses. But, 
saturated with fraud as are the manifestations which 
the so-called spiritualists deal in, nevertheless there is a 
murdered truth beneath the monument of falsehood 
which that sect has built — a truth not dead, of course, 
but murdered in its power with honest and reasonable 
thinkers who have no special ability to distinguish it, by 



SPIRIT. 35 

its association with fraud and imposition, until it is next 
to impossible to distinguish the true from the false. We 
have seen that for the very reason that the senses put us 
in relation with the material universe and not with that of 
spirit, we are most susceptible to influences from the latter 
when our attention is most off guard — when we are least 
ourselves. This passive abdication of our own personality 
would be anything but a desirable habit to cultivate, but 
cultivate it as much as we might we never could bring 
these influences under the control of our will, since the 
condition of receiving them is that the will must be in 
abeyance. When, however, a man becomes a professional 
spirit medium, though he may profess passivity, when he 
engages to exhibit them in effect he assumes to bring these 
influences under the command of his w 7 ill, which must 
really separate him from' them. Hence we might al- 
most reach the conclusion a priori, which seems to be 
true in experience, that every professional medium is an 
impostor and a dealer in fraud. 

Fortunately, for our uses, we have evidence enough 
without calling on that which has been juggled and 
blended with falsehood until its very mention is a sug- 
gestion of fraud. We may consider the conclusions 
which we have reached as established and use them with- 
out question in what further we have to say. 

We have found that there is a spirit in man, or, rather, 
that man himself is spirit. We have found, also, that the 
home and habitat of spirit is in the universe of the un- 
seen where it enjoys and uses powers that we do not 
possess. 

We know that the human spiritual person originates 
with, and passes a stage of existence in, a material body, 
which is its instrument, but it is universal experience 
that this instrument becomes inadequate to the spirit's 



36 THE MISSING SENSE. 

uses and desires. We know also that the instrument 
perishes in death, but having become aware of the exist- 
ence of spirits, intelligences without material bodies, and 
knowing also that something ', of any kind, in any instance 
known to science never becomes nothing, we can scarcely 
imagine it to do so, the inference is reasonable that when 
the body is destroyed in death the spirit assumes its 
place in that transcendent universe in which pure spirit 
dwells. Indeed, the opposite of this, that it ceases to 
exist, in view of the established facts, is incredible. In 
gross matter, forms may change, compounds may be re- 
duced to simples, recombinations may take place in new 
forms, but simples may not be destroyed. 

There are indications, as we have seen, that the gross 
and perceptible may come from, and possibly return to, 
the ethereal and imperceptible, but even in this case its 
substance does not cease to exist, it but changes its form 
to assume another, which, though imperceptible to our 
senses, is more essential, more permanent in itself, and in 
a sense more real. Spirit we find existing in this tran- 
scendent universe as spirit and intelligence still. Hence, 
spirit is a simple which is incapable of decomposition, 
or, as the consciousness of the ego, that which calls itself 
I, attests, of division. The spiritual person is an inde- 
structible unit. Spirit is living. Spirit is life. Spirit 
cannot die. If it could die that for spirit would be an- 
nihilation, which even its inferior, matter, cannot experi- 
ence. 

Some of the functions of spirit in us are will, percep- 
tion, memory, emotion, judgment, and reason. For each 
and all of these functions, then, the inference is fair that 
wherever it exists it emanates from, and is a function of, 
spirit. But we see all of these manifested in varying 
degrees in our dumb friends, the lower animals. We 



spirit. 37 

should never think of doubting this if the theological 
and not scientific notions that have come down to us from 
the past had not trained our habits of thought on the 
very unreasonable hypothesis that what we call their in- 
stinct is the manifestation of an intelligence not their 
own working through them as unconscious machines not 
even aware of their own movements. It follows that 
spirit lives in the lower animals as truly as in ourselves. 
They are spiritual persons, of a lower order, of course, 
but equally with ourselves immortal. 

Thinkers of theological training, as a rule, though 
there are exceptions, shrink from this conclusion, but 
why they should do so is not apparent. No sooner is it 
suggested that the arguments they are using to show the 
immortality of the human soul tend to prove the same 
for the lower animals than they sound retreat, and in so 
doing give up the only foundation in reason and the 
nature of things on which they might base their conclu- 
sions. Not only do they give up their proper founda- 
tion in reason and the nature of things, in their blind 
allegiance to the time-honored interpretations which 
have been read into the authority to which they have 
trained themselves to bend their reason, but in doing this 
they turn the guns of reason and the nature of things 
against themselves. For instance, Bishop Foster, in 
" Beyond the Grave," says of the argument he has used, 
H It is said to prove too much in that it proves that all 
animals are immortal — even the meanest insects. Some 
have seemed to hold this doctrine. We do not. There 
is not a particle of ground for the imagination that any 
animal, not even the simply animal part of man, is destined 
to immortality. . . . An animal is but a form of mat- 
ter peculiarly endowed, a living form. Its apparent 
intelligence is purely automatic and not personal, a form 



38 THE MISSING SENSE. 

of impulse from without. There is contained in the ani- 
mal no subject of which these impulses and attributes can 
be predicated." 

A most remarkable statement for a reasonable man to 
make surely ! Then in regard to man he says : " How 
is it that we must conceive that he still exists and the 
animal does not ? We have admitted that to mere sense 
the cases seem precisely alike. . . . But we have shown 
that man is a spirit. This the animal is not." Thus he 
settles the only question at issue by assuming a negative 
answer to it in spite of the evidence of his " mere" 
senses. What more trustworthy source of information 
the bishop had in regard to this matter he neglects to 
tell us, and we are convinced that no possible evidence 
could have any weight whatever against a preconceived 
opinion to a mind that could assume thus, without more 
trustworthy evidence, that like effects are the result of 
unlike causes, and that the intelligence and the varied 
emotions which are manifested in the lower animals are 
but a form of impulse from without, and not manifesta- 
tions of an intelligence and feeling properly belonging to 
the animal that manifests them. Such a case is beyond 
the reach of argument. 

Let us notice what is involved in the conclusion we 
have reached. It is evident that if the gap that sepa- 
rates man from the most intelligent of the lower animals 
does not exclude them from the world of spirit and im- 
mortality, no other line can be drawn that will exclude 
anything that lives. There is no abrupt transition any- 
where among the living from the non-intelligent to the 
intelligent, no line of demarkation among species where 
we might reasonably say on this side is spirit but on that 
side it is not. There is an imperceptible gradation of 
spirit rank among species, from the most intelligent all 



SPIRIT. 39 

the way to that lowest type of life where science yet 
finds a debatable ground as to whether this or that living 
form is animal or vegetable, and must appeal to chem- 
istry to settle the question as well as may be, subject to 
future corrections ; that scarcely organized substratum 
of the living from which branch the two lines of increas- 
ing specialization of form and higher rank of being — this 
animal, that vegetable. We must, therefore, admit the 
immortality of the living principle in all that lives, both 
animal and plant, or give up the fort to the materialist 
and deny the existence of spirit as a reality independent 
of matter. This, however, we cannot do — observed fact 
and necessary reason forbid it. 

Why any one should shrink from such a conclusion is 
not obvious. True, in the absence of all volition, all in- 
telligence, and all perception, the condition which we 
recognize in vegetable life, we cannot understand what 
there could be of such a spirit to be immortal, but neither 
can we understand it as we see it manifested in living 
vegetable forms. That some intangible, incomprehensi- 
ble principle does exist in each living plant w r e know. It 
opposes the tendency of the plant's structure to decay ; it 
builds up a form which non-living nature is ever striving 
to tear down ; it determines the growth of each plant and 
the multiplication of each species true to the distinctive 
characters of its kind, but to our conscious intelligence 
it bears no relation that we can understand. Neverthe- 
less, its reality in living plants none can doubt, and 
when reason demands that we should recognize the im- 
mortality of that principle, why should we shrink 
from it ? The presence of these living forms, both 
animal and vegetable, in this material world, certainly 
does not make it less interesting or less happy, and why 
the existence of corresponding realities in the spiritual 



4:0 THE MISSING SENSE. 

world should either be dreaded or thought absurd is not 
clear. 

By this line of thought we are led to the conclusion 
that the principle of life itself is spirit. Scientists have 
tried to show that it is a manifestation of convertible, 
energy, or some property pertaining to matter which is 
manifested only under special conditions. That they 
have failed in any way to get hold of it in their re- 
searches is acknowledged. We recognize the reality of 
what scientific men regard as even the most important 
side of their field of research, the non-living forces, con- 
vertible energy in its several known forms, also gravita- 
tion and chemical affinities, but all of these have a 
measurableness about them, and bear such relations to the 
matter with which they are associated, that their non- 
spiritnal nature is evident. 

The life principle uses these forms of energy in the 
functions of the living being, but when sought out to 
their uttermost limit they leave their guiding and master- 
ing principle of life unmeasured and unaccounted for. 

From whatever side we approach it the principle of 
life bears the marks of spirit, distinct from all forms of 
the non-living forces or their functions. 



That which does not exist cannot bring itself into be- 
ing. There is no truth known to man more indubitably 
certain than this. No axiom of mathematics is more 
universally true. It is, ever has been, and ever mast be 
true, here and everywhere, throughout the infinite uni- 
verse, whether in the realm of matter, of force, or of 
spirit. No other axiom is more directly self-evident 
than this. Like other axioms it is neither capable of nor 
in need of proof. We know its truth because we are in- 
telligent. Not to know it would be to lack intelligence. 



SPIRIT. 41 

So much of metaphysics we state, for we need it. We 
cannot understand even physics without it. ISTo one 
doubts it, bat, having it well formulated and ready to 
our hand, it will help us to bring truths into light which 
otherwise might, perhaps, remain in obscurity. 

Let us think of what occurs when a new life comes into 
being. Joseph Cook, in Biology, Lectures, 4, 5, and 6, 
has followed the line of thought which we wish here to 
use. In substance we will borrow it from him, chang- 
ing the details, however, as may be necessary to accord 
with the present better knowledge of the processes de- 
scribed. This, then, should first be noticed. Every liv- 
ing being, so far as matter is concerned, from the first 
segmentation that occurs in the vitalized egg till death 
is composed of matter in a flow. First, not itself, food ; 
then itself, living ; then not itself, debris or waste, dead. 
More minutely there is first pabulum, or substance, pre- 
pared for assimilation ; next bioplasts, in which life is most 
particularly active. These are exceedingly minute, visi- 
ble, after special preparation by staining, with the aid of 
a good microscope only. These absorb the pabulum, 
making it a part of their substance, and in this process it 
becomes alive ; or sometimes they act as carriers, select- 
ing and passing through their substance matter required 
to build up the tissue of which they are the vital ele- 
ment, or passing it along when needed elsewhere. They 
are a transparent, structureless, but viscid, glue-like fluid. 
They form around themselves a coating of solider mat- 
ter, a cell wall, not always exactly of the same character, 
but of the kind needed in each part. Each little mass 
moves seemingly of itself ; if not encased in a cell wall 
extending portions of itself this way and that, flowing 
into the extended portion and so changing place or cut- 
ting it off as a bud detached to be a new mass like that 



42 THE MISSING SENSE. 

from which it was derived. These little bioplasts flow- 
ing onward and budding onward build the tissues of 
formed matter around them. 

We think that Mr. Cook is mistaken, or that his lan- 
guage is, at least, misleading when he denies that this 
formed matter is alive. True, there is a tissue of earthy 
matter built among the living as a frame- work, in bone, 
which cannot be thought to be living ; also a store of 
food material, as fat, and an envelope of epidermis, with 
its appendages, that has been extruded from the living, 
which it serves to protect, together with some other tis- 
sues and substances in the body, the non-living character 
of which must be admitted ; but one life as we conceive 
it must pervade the whole being. True, it is in and 
through the bioplasts only, that the life-processes of nutri- 
tion, assimilation, and structure-building take place ; 
doubtless it is owing to an arbitrary definition of life by 
Mr. Cook's authorities, basing it on the presence of 
these functions, that he has been led to make the state- 
ment that these bioplasts only are living ; but, according 
to the view that has hitherto been maintained of the 
structure of the animal mechanism, this would reduce 
each living being not to a unit but to an innumerable 
colony of separate individuals, which seems to us absurd. 
Perhaps, however, if the deadness of all formed matter 
be insisted on the difficulty may yet be removed by the 
recently discovered indications that the bioplasm of the 
ultimate nerve fibres opens into, and is continuous with, 
that of the cells in the tissue to which they are dis- 
tributed. The nervous system is the first link in the 
chain of mechanism through which the life principle is 
manifested, and such a nerve termination as this, if it 
shall be established, must fuse the living being into a 
unit through the substance in which life resides most in- 



SPIRIT. 43 

timately and actively of all. The formed matter is mech- 
anism ; its further history is that it serves its purpose 
as such for a time, grows old, wears out, and is cast off 
as waste, while its place is supplied by new matter from 
the bioplasts as before ; but generally not, as we think, 
until it is thus worn out and ready to be cast off as waste 
can it properly be said to be not living. Bioplasts in all 
parts of the creature and in all living beings are micro- 
scopically alike, and so far as it has been possible to as- 
certain chemically alike also. Life resides in them with 
a special intimacy, but their composition is not the cause 
of their life — life is the cause of their composition rather, 
since they may die without losing or acquiring any sub- 
stance. When once dead they can never be restored to 
life, and not until dead does their constitution begin to 
change. 

When a new being is to be formed this is what hap- 
pens : The substance of the egg from which it is to arise, 
as a whole or in part, begins to divide and subdivide, 
thus forming many cells in which bioplasts are differen- 
tiated from the pabulum stored up in the egg for their 
earliest nourishment. Soon these bioplasts arrange them- 
selves into delicate layers which proceed to fold and 
shape themselves into the first rudimentary traces of the 
embryo creature which is building. Now groups of 
these bioplasts gather in the parts where the solider 
frame is needed, and begin to assume the character of 
cartilage, which finally gives place to bone. Others take 
their places to form the walls of tubes, which are to serve 
as blood-vessels, while from others, with the necessary 
fluids, the blood is formed which fills them and circulates 
through them. Other bioplasts arrange themselves in 
delicate threads from which nerves are to be developed, 
others build themselves into muscular tissue, and so on, 



44 THE MISSING SENSE. 

until every tissue and every organ is built, each bioplast 
depositing the kind of matter that is needed, in just the 
form required to perfect in its minutest details the crea- 
ture that is building, together with the complicated mech- 
anism that is needed for its protection and maintenance 
while building. These microscopic bioplasts, little, struc- 
tureless, viscid, colorless masses with nothing visible to 
propel them, each goes about its business, takes its place 
and fulfils its part according to the plan of the creature 
that is to be, a plan so intricate, involving so much of 
minutise as yet unknown to man that the most learned 
and skilful anatomist living, had he the power to make 
his will effective, could not give them the needed direc- 
tions without omission or mistake to build the simplest 
organized creature that lives ; yet these little dots of 
viscid fluid go on and build a man without confusion and 
without mistake. 

What does this ? These bioplasts are not guided by 
the structure of the creature, for there is no structure 
there until they have built it. The parents whence were 
derived the first bioplasts from which this structure was 
begun, and the material in which this process goes on for 
a time, do not guide them, for they are all unconscious 
of what is taking place. If they were aware of it their 
intelligence would be wholly inadequate to direct it, and 
neither their, intelligence nor their will have power to 
affect or change this process in the slightest degree. 

They do not guide themselves surely, for if they did 
each little, structureless, microscopic dot must be endowed 
with an intelligence compared with which that of the 
finished man after years of education would be as nothing. 

An army of intelligent men is helpless without a com- 
mander ; the simplest movement would result in con- 
fusion ; a campaign for a definite purpose would be im- 



SPIRIT. 45 

possible without a general ; even a mob without leaders 
is not formidable ; yet the most intricate military cam- 
paign is beyond comparison simple to that which these 
bioplasts accomplish in building the simplest organized 
creature that lives. Can any intelligent person think, 
then, for a moment, that they build a human body with- 
out a commander, moved only by the life, without intel- 
ligence, which is in them ? Not if he comprehends the 
case. 

It is not law that guides them, for law is only a fixed 
order of procedure, not by any possibility an intelligence 
or a power. Yet this process is one that requires both 
intelligence and power, which man is not able to compre- 
hend ; an intelligence and power which must necessa- 
rily be unintermittingly present and active in each indi- 
vidual case ; a power which pushes each bioplast the 
way it should go, and causes it to deposit matter around 
itself of the kind and in the shape required, but which 
itself requires no material agents, no tools, no body, 
j which occupies no space to the exclusion of anything else 
. in working this wonder ; an intelligence that knows 
what is needed more minutely than the microscope can 
ever tell us ; an intelligence and power which, either 
in proper person or by spiritual agents, themselves intel- 
ligent beyond our ability to understand them, has car- 
ried out similar plans with the same skill since life first 
began on the earth ; an intelligence and power neces- 
sarily not embodied in a material organization, but pare 
spirit, spirit acting on matter which is not its own em- 
bodiment ; spirit which has existed the same from the 
remotest beginning to which our imagination can carry 
;back our thoughts, and which gives its attention to things 
even the most minute. The origin of each living being 
necessarily proves the reality, the presence, and the action 



: 



46 THE MISSING SENSE. 

of such a power and such an intelligence as this, or our 
axiom is not true. 

And what is this but God ? God the Creator, who did 
not build this earth and this universe a machine, store it 
with energy to serve for a period greater or less, set it 
running, and then leave it, but who lives in, moves, and 
sustains it in every part, at every moment. And what 
is this which is done but the miracle of creation, done 
not once for all, but repeated in the case of every man 
and every creature that ever lived or ever shall live ? 






CHAPTER III. 

MAN AND HIS MEANING. 

All life comes from the living. This, science has 
learned to recognize as a law of nature probably without 
exception since life first appeared on the earth. It is 
immeasurably beyond the power of any material living 
being to build and make alive another, as we have seen ; 
but that through and from the living new life shall orig- 
inate is the law, the uniform method, by which the in- 
telligent spiritual power through whose agency each liv- 
ing creature must come into being has chosen to stock 
the universe with life. From the living the first bioplast 
already endowed with life is taken to start the new life ; 
from the living the pabulum is taken to nourish for a 
time the new living, growing form ; in the living, 
throughout the class mammalia with man at its head, 
that form is built ; after the pattern of the living the 
'new form is fashioned ; and after the spiritual qualities 
of the new person have begun to manifest themselves it 
is soon evident that they, too, have received important 
modifications from those of their ancestors. At first a 
new-born child manifests but little more of the spiritual 
than is seen in plants, a power of motion over which it 
has no control, a physical irritability that soon develops 
into the sense of feeling, the functions necessary to life, 
of which it is not conscious, and this is all. 

An incomprehensible bundle of possibilities and sus- 
ceptibilities only at first, its spirit is an imperceptible 



: 



48 THE MISSING SENSE. 

something capable of unlimited education. Yet spiritual 
qualities that go to constitute character are there or they 
could never be educated. Education develops the powers 
that are in man ; it never can give him any that he does 
not possess. 

It is not to be supposed that the parents build this 
spiritual nature any more 'than that they build the phys- 
ical body, if, indeed, their part in its formation is as 
great. The necessity of an intelligent spiritual cause for 
the origin of an intelligent spiritual being can hardly be 
thought less than for the building of the material body. 

Though, as it is spiritual, there are no complicated move- 
ments of constituting parts and changes of material con- 
ditions that we can watch in its forming, we can hardly 
do otherwise than assume that the God who Himself must 
build the new body Himself forms the new spirit in it. 

Nevertheless it is the law of life that the new being, body 
and spirit, grows up much like its ancestors before it. It 
is also a law, abundantly proved, that the new being is 
influenced physically and spiritually by the surroundings, 
conditions, and emotions of the mother while it is form- 
ing. These laws give rise to the hereditary and congen- 
ital characteristics which are the start in life of each new 
soul. 

This foundation of character must remain through all 
the future the fundamental nature of each soul. Its in- 
fluence can never be escaped nor discarded ; its qualities 
may be, however, and are, modified afterward by edu- 
cation, by circumstances, and by effort. 

We have used here the word soul to express the spirit 
as clothed in its material body, but implying and includ- 
ing the thought of its existence after death, reserving 
the word spirit for use when the material conditions of 
life are not contained in the idea expressed. , 



MAN" AND HIS MEANING. 49 

As the child grows it may be seen that nothing that 
ever comes to its consciousness fails to leave its impress. 

Surroundings create their impressions on the young 
consciousness reaching out to understand them, and thus 
tastes are modified and formed. Acts repeated form 
habits, each act making others of its kind more natural 
and more easy. Emotions and feelings become habits 
of soul, growing ever more prominent and more char- 
acteristic as the young person is exercised by them more 
frequently and more intensely. Thoughts lead to other 
like thoughts and become habits of mind. Each and 
all, perceptions, feelings, acts, and thoughts, leave their 
impress on the young soul to foi*m the character which 
must act and be acted upon in the future. Man is, and 
ever must he, a resultant of all he has ever been, or felt, 
or done, or thought. 

Is the parallelogram of forces from mechanics a fig- 
ure vivid in the reader's mind ? With the method of 
the composition of forces, generally, it is a most useful 
figure in making this thought clear and its truth appar- 
ent, to illustrate the case we are considering and to show 
w T hat a resultant means. 

Largely, character is a result of causes not itself, and 
for their effect, and for character, so far as it is a result 
of these causes only, justice can hold no soul responsi- 
ble. All the original God-given qualities of the human 
spirit have not, however, been considered. Among these 
original, fundamental, God-given qualities, is the spon- 
taneous knowledge of right and wrong, of good and evil, 
and of the obligation and power to adhere to and loyally 
follow the right and the good, and to shun, resist, and 
cultivate a hatred of the opposite qualities. 

Of course the degree of strength of character that can 
originally be brought to bear for this purpose is a part of 



50 THE MISSING SENSE. 

the soul's original endowment, and some by no fault of 
their own are very weak. Yet our judgment of our- 
selves and of each other, as well as all human justice, is 
founded upon the conviction that there is inherent in 
each soul power enough to set its face in the right direc- 
tion, to turn the algebraic sum of its impulses, be that 
sum great or small, in the right way. And the effort to do 
so persisted in, like any other persistent effort, soon be- 
comes a habit that will help and give increasing velocity 
and momentum to the soul's progress toward goodness, 
and increase its strength to do right. 

We have spoken of God-given qualities of the human 
spirit. Having found spirit and found God through fact 
and reason, we may reasonably assume that qualities 
which are common to all are such in a special sense. 

In our judgments of the character and conduct of others 
there is one fundamental difficulty that may possibly lead 
to error or even to injustice in some degree, in spite of 
our utmost care to avoid error and injustice. That diffi- 
culty is that it is impossible to understand or judge of the 
character and motives of others except by interpreting 
their conduct by our own consciousness. 

Remembering this, we will go on in our quest of truth. 
If the seemings to us fail to coincide with the seemings 
to the reader, no effort of ours could persuade him to 
agree with us ; if, on the contrary, our judgments coincide 
with those of the reader, he will by that fact be sure of 
their correctness, and the foundation of his confidence 
will be strengthened. 

This, then, we see : as each new soul grows, gains in 
strength and understanding, and puts forth its varied 
activities in life it engages in a warfare. 

With the earliest consciousness of the little one comes 



MAN AND HIS MEANING. 51 

the discovery that in some things it finds pleasure, in 
others it finds displeasure ; either spiritual displeasure 
or physical pain. It necessarily is drawn to the pleasur- 
able and repelled by its opposite. The love of its mother 
gives it pleasure and soon awakens in some degree a like 
feeling in resj)onse. This pleasure never in all the 
future finds any condemnation coming to the under- 
standing to stamp it wrong ; and as the child increases in 
understanding it finds the principle of love extending to 
others, and it learns to take pleasure in their well-being 
and to sympathize with their suffering. This ever comes 
to the understanding bearing its own credentials as 
good. 

There are other things, however, in which pleasure is 
found. The toys and playthings with which the child's 
young understanding and imagination find occupation 
soon awaken the consciousness of proprietorship, and it 
wishes to possess more and more without limit. This 
brings its desires in conflict with the rights of others, and 
also in conflict with the limitations of necessity and their 
gratification is incomplete. 

The resistance which these desires meet tends to ex- 
cite anger, and anger carries with it a sting of unhappi- 
ness. The services which love and the needs of the 
child prompt others to render it soon awaken in it a 
pleasure derived from calling them forth. The babe 
often throws its playthings on the floor, seemingly just 
to see its attendants pick them up. It derives pleasure 
from the attention it receives, and soon becomes impatient 
when its attendant reads or attends to other things than 
itself. From these sources a love of power and domin- 
ion over others arises which necessarily encounters resist- 
ance. Resistance, again, has a tendency to excite anger, 
and anger carries with it its sting of unhappiness, which 



52 THE MISSING SENSE. 

is added to the unhappiness of desires unsatisfied. The 
displeasure of others is also necessarily incurred as these 
desires and passions are yielded to, and this displeasure 
again brings to its object unhappiness, which it is apt to 
resent in anger. 

Anger is in itself a painful passion, but added to its 
pain is a sting which the child, as its reason grows strong 
in future years, may learn to recognize as the conscious- 
ness of disapproval of self ; the self-evident stamp of 
evil. These seem to be in the child the beginnings of 
evil, all arising out of the tendency of selfishness to over- 
leap its proper bounds. 

An appetite strong in the normally constituted child 
is the desire for knowledge. The young understanding 
is full of questions reaching out to this, and that, and 
everything which it perceives, and seeking to know their 
nature and their meaning. 

This is the appetite of the young soul for truth. By 
gratifying this it grows in strength and power. This 
desire does not come in conflict with the rights of others, 
and as it is gratified the border land of truth beyond the 
already known ever widens as it recedes, and the imper- 
fectly known and misunderstood is ever receiving correc- 
tions, as new, and earnest, and honest effort is made by 
the ever-growing soul to attain it. This appetite, and 
the effort to gratify it, always bears the self-evident 
stamp of good. The soul meets self-approbation, and 
never its opposite, as it engages in the search for the truth 
which it loves, which it sees spreading to infinity before 
it and promising an occupation for eternity. And the 
approbation which it accords itself it accords to others 
also who engage in the like pursuit. 

As the child grows older, diverging ways open before 
it every where. A thousand things done by its associates 



MAN AND HIS MEANING. 53 

at home or in school it is prompted to imitate and vary 
on its own account. 

When victimized by the petty injustices of childhood 
it resents them, and is prompted to retaliate, or in some 
cases it is grieved and indignant, while it scorns to do the 
like itself ; but in the resentment or the indignation, 
whether it imitates the wrong or not, it manifests its 
feeling that there is wrong in the act and that it ought 
not to have been done, and its judgment that the wrong- 
doer was also aw T are of the obligation not to do it. The 
child is born with a moral sense native to it, as surely as 
it is born organized for the exercise of the bodily senses. 

In the tales which childhood delights in, its sympathies 
are enlisted on the side of the good and its indignation 
goes out against the evil, the cruel, treacherous, and 
false, as surely as the magnet freely suspended ranges 
itself on the meridian. 

The child not only knows the good instinctively, but 
its own personality being withdrawn, so that its native 
choice is not obscured by the things which pertain to its 
pleasures, it loves the good and hates the evil always. 

Where moral qualities pertain to its own conduct the 
child has the choice, and exercises it very often, of fol- 
lowing the good at the sacrifice of some wished-for pleas- 
ure, or seeking that pleasure at the expense of doing the 
wrong which its native sense condemns. 

Certain acts and modes of conduct, in which pleasure 
is felt or anticipated, are in opposition to the wishes of 
parents or teachers ; and since their approval, as w T ell as 
the pleasure anticipated from what violates their wishes, 
is desired, the choice is presented to the young under- 
standing either to refrain from the course it desires to 
follow, and thus win the desired approval, adopt that 
course, and attempt to conceal or deny the fact, or, adopt- 



54 THE MISSING SENSE. 

ing it, to brave the displeasure of parents and teachers. 
Most children as they grow up try more or less all these 
courses, but the third least frequently. The first course, 
if followed, is rewarded by the self-approval that always 
follows right action, in addition to the approval of others, 
which was desired beforehand. The second, if the de- 
ception is successful, wins for a time the approval of those 
deceived, but is followed by the sting of self-disappro- 
bation stamping it wrong — a sting w 7 hich loses its poig- 
nancy, however, if deception becomes habitual, and is re- 
placed by a sort of self -gratification at the notion of one's 
cunning and skill in deceit. This is wickedness of char- 
acter not infrequently developed in the young. If, as 
is most often the case, the conduct disapproved of and 
habitually concealed is in itself vicious, then that has 
grown into a habit, together with the habit of deception 
or dishonesty, and the character is marred with double 
force on two sides at once. Yet, no matter how deeply 
rooted these habits may have become, no matter how 
blunted the conscience-sting of self-accusation may be, 
nor how its place may be usurped by the conceit of cun- 
ning and the gratification of vice, they are always known 
to be w r rong, the self- disapproval is felt though it may 
have ceased to be painful, as is shown by the effort to 
conceal the truth and to appear what one is not. 

The third course is honest, and, therefore, better than 
the second, but it is open rebellion, to be followed by an 
immediate conflict involving unpleasant consequences, 
and, therefore, except by children of unusual strength of 
character, not often followed. 

Soon moral qualities in lines of thought and imagina- 
tion are felt. Thought concerning things that are good, 
thought reaching out to understand the truths of nature, 
and imagination picturing and delighting in what is 



MAN AND HIS MEANING. 55 

beautiful and clean — these are felt to be wholesome and 
good ; even the young child knows this ; but thoughts of 
deeds of wickedness when not associated with a horror of 
them, imaginations that picture and associate the mind 
with the evil, or that revel in the unclean — these are evil, 
and tend to bear fruit in character and conduct similar to 
the imaginings which have become habitual. The young 
child has a native sense by which some thoughts are per- 
ceived to be unclean as soon as they are presented to the 
mind. This appears from the natural tendency of chil- 
dren to talk freely with parents and older friends of good 
and proper things, but to conceal from them the evil 
imaginings which are often indulged in and talked of 
among themselves. Unfortunately the importance of 
cultivating the pure and good in the mind and of shut- 
ting out and resisting the opposite is not usually taught 
the child as early or as strongly as it should be, and for 
this reason the characters of many receive an ineffaceable 
stain before such a thing is suspected. 

When manhood is reached habits and characters have 
been determined by the course which each one has fol- 
lowed mainly through his voluntary choice, and a sepa- 
ration has taken place. 

Some have followed in the main the good. Though 
they may have yielded to the evil frequently they have 
nevertheless loved the good, and have kept up the fight 
in its favor with strength ever increasing on the side of 
their choice. These, if active in mind and diligent in 
pursuit of truth, are now fitted for the world's highest 
work, for its places of trust and responsibility. They 
are, by a distinction that has in it nothing artificial, the 
world's best society ; and, as in all cases, their charac- 
ter is stamped on their person. Their bodies may possi- 
bly be deformed and their features irregular, but with 



56 THE MISSING SENSE. 

good habits, intelligent and active minds, and truthful, 
honest characters, seeking ever to be what they wish to 
seem, and never to seem what really they are not, nobil- 
ity of soul shines through every feature and manifests 
itself in their presence everywhere. Yet none but those 
whose characters are akin to their own, whose souls have 
grown into sympathy and similarity with them, are able 
to perceive, understand, and appreciate this fact. 

Others of active intelligence have gained in knowledge 
equally with the first class ; but loving the rewards of 
goodness rather than the good itself, their care has been 
to keep up appearances. Knowing the impossibility of 
keeping habitual conduct concealed, their course toward 
others is right in the main. They are ruled, however, 
by hope of rewards and fear of consequences, not by 
principles ; they take pleasure in what is evil in their 
thoughts, and when, according to their judgment, their 
acts will not become known to those whose respect would 
be forfeited thereby, they take pleasure in evil acts also. 

A favorite motto with such is, ' ' Honesty is the best 
policy ;" but it is policy and not honesty that guides their 
conduct. Exactly reversing the effort of the preceding 
class, they are seeking ever to seem what they are not, 
and never to be what they wish to seem. They are 
fundamentally dishonest, and dishonesty is the principal 
factor of most wickedness. Such as they are not aware 
of the fact, but the insincerity of their characters is more 
or less manifested in their features and behavior also. It 
is the task of their lifetime to train the features to con- 
ceal the thoughts and emotions under them, and to a 
degree their effort is successful ; but the outshining frank- 
ness of truly honest character, the very mobility of ex- 
pression with which the features of the truly sincere are 
transparent, is thereby lacking and cannot be counter- 



MAN AND HIS MEANING. 57 

feited, and in their failure to simulate this successfully 
their true selves are in some degree apparent. These, 
however, take rank in life quite as high, and act their 
part with as much ability and success, as the first 
class, though in their ranks, mostly, a certain class of 
crimes, as embezzlements and breaches of trust, are com- 
mitted. 

Others from hereditary weakness, unfortunate circum- 
stances, or other causes, have failed to cultivate the ap- 
petite for knowledge and truth as it should be cultivated, 
and that appetite has lost its keenness. 

Their minds, insufficiently fed, have become puny 
starvelings. They have not acquired power to think 
very strongly ; their thoughts, like their dreams, wander 
unguided, as they are led by circumstances and not by 
intelligent choice. These are fitted for many of life's 
occupations, but not for the highest places to which men 
are called. Every shade of moral character is found 
among people of this as of every other degree of intel- 
lectual culture and ability, and that character is quite as 
plainly shown in the features and presence of these as of 
the classes before mentioned. Their power for good or 
evil is less, but their goodness or wickedness does not 
vary with their intellectual culture and ability. 

Another class must be considered, which, while it con- 
tains representatives of every degree of intellectual abil- 
ity, is yet drawn mainly from the uncultivated. 

These are the habitually vicious, living evil lives 
seemingly from choice. They have acquired vicious 
tastes and evil habits. They have yielded to evil 
promptings until habit has strengthened the evil and 
rendered the good powerless with them. The self- 
reproach with which evil conduct is originally accom- 
panied, having been habitually disregarded, has lost its 



58 THE MISSING SENSE. 

power to trouble them. Evil lives having become habit- 
ual, their tastes are fixed thereby, and they now take 
pleasure in evil, while everything that is pure and good 
has become to them distasteful. They spend their lives 
in disgraceful resorts and habits of vice, and they easily 
and naturally drift into crime. 

Some are born to such conditions in the slums of cities, 
and never rise out of them. What ability or opportunity 
in life is ever given them to do so, or how in the great 
hereafter it is ever to be made right with such, we do not 
know ; but many sink to this condition whose opportu- 
nities are equal to those of others, who rise to a very differ- 
ent life. These, too, bear the mark of their character 
and life in their features and persons, and people of a 
healthy moral character are instinctively repelled by 
su^h, and shun their society as they would shun the lives 
they lead. The tendency to evil is a tendency to make 
monsters of men, and in these this tendency bears fruit. 
They live as monsters — the monster within them moulds 
their person in a degree into its likeness, and monsters 
they die before their full time. 

In this outline sketch of human life it has been our 
wish to study man himself, not his surroundings or his 
possessions. 

It is too much the fashion to measure the degree of 
success of a man's life by what he acquires, by the 
wealth he has heaped up ; but this is a most mischievous 
and pitiable mistake. The wealth a man acquires or pos- 
sesses is in no sense the man, and in no sense does it 
measure him. It is won by the good and by the bad ; 
quite as often by the bad as by the good. The success 
or failure of a man's efforts to acquire it is quite as much 
dependent on circumstances not under his control as on 



MAX AND HIS MEANING. 59 

his own efforts. When won it gives him power which 
may be used according to the will of its owner, hence it 
is right and proper that wealth should be sought within 
bounds as a means to effect good and proper ends ; but 
when its acquisition is made the purpose of life, this pur- 
pose becomes an immeasurable evil. The man who 
makes this his purpose in life is tempted to wrong others 
in carrying it out. He forgets the good for which he 
ought to live ; his purpose in itself is selfishness carried 
beyond its uses, which, as we have seen, is the origin of 
evil in man. And as a purpose and object of life it is 
contemptible, having no continuance beyond the death of 
the body, while the man himself is then but entering his 
life. 

In living with such an object, man misses the purpose 
of his being here, and really does himself an injury that 
eternity cannot undo. 

There are two proper standards by which the success 
of a man's life may be estimated. One is by what he 
is, the other by what he does — by the influence of his life 
on the world. And, when measured by the latter stand- 
ard, of those who have left the mark of their influence 
on the world, it is surprising how few have been men of 
wealth ; or of those who may have had wealth, how little 
is known of it, and how little their influence on the world 
has depended on its possession. It would seem as if the 
influence and power which is derived from wealth, like 
its possession, has no hereafter. 

Eight character, honesty, love and devotion to what is 
good and true — these pertain to the man himself ; and to 
such character all rightly tuned souls instinctively feel 
that happiness and well-being should attach, that they are 
merited, and that justice demands them as its reward. 

The man whose soul is not distorted with evil loves right 



60 THE MISSING SENSE. 

character and knows that it merits happiness and the ap- 
proval of all the good, and this without regard to its 
power. Happiness does not in this life attach to Tight- 
ness of character in such a manner and degree as to sat- 
isfy justice, but we can find a good reason why this must 
be so ; and now that we know this life to be but a prepar- 
atory school before the real life begins, we need not be 
troubled at this fact. 

The man that loves and follows the good is living a 
successful life according to the first standard by which 
the success of life is rightly measured — successful in 
being worthy of happiness and respect, which justice 
will ultimately accord to him or justice is without power 
in the universe. 

The second standard is a measure of power ; but the 
power of a man, his genius and ability, is not mainly of 
his own winning, it depends largely on his hereditary 
endowment and the circumstances of his life. 

Duty requires that such power as a man has shall be 
used for right purposes, and that duty being fulfilled, jus- 
tice declares the merit equal of the strong and the weak. 

We have recognized the moral character of men as the 
quality by which they are rightly to be judged, meas- 
ured, and compared, in which their merit or lack of 
merit consists. This moral character consists, not of 
conduct, but of the tastes and distastes, likings and dis- 
likes, loves and hatreds which are the motives that lie 
behind conduct. Added to this the energy and strength 
of will with which the man controls his conduct as deter- 
mined by the choice to which these motives lead him, is 
an element of character very important in regard to its 
effectiveness in the world ; and so far as this strength is 
in his power to determine, very important in regard to 
merit. 



MAK AKD HIS MEANING. 61 

Right character consists in the love of what is good. 
The quality of goodness pertains to the man in the de- 
gree to which that quality is loved, but to the extent to 
which his loves and motives centre in himself he misses 
the good. His loves must reach out of himself for their 
objects, or they are evil. 

The qualities of good and evil are real. They are 
recognized instantly and with certainty by all unspoiled 
humanity from childhood through life. The obligation 
to conform to the good is felt as universally as the qual- 
ity of goodness is perceived. 

To the degree in which the quality of goodness is per- 
ceived it is loved. 

This we believe to be universally true. There are, as 
we have seen, other desires and other loves which come 
in conflict with the good, and as these are yielded to or 
entertained, the perception of goodness and its beauty 
and loveliness is dimmed, and the love which the percep- 
tion of these qualities necessarily inspires grows cold. 
When the good is no longer perceived to be good, that 
love vanishes. 

On the contrary, when the obligation to follow the 
good, which is felt from the beginning, is obeyed, the 
perception of the moral quality grows clearer, and as 
that perception grows more vivid its beauty and loveli- 
ness grow more bright, and the soul that follows it glows 
with a love for it more and more intense. 

As manhood is reached there is a tendency to idealize 
those in whom the qualities of goodness are most clearly 
perceived. The beauty of these qualities seems to con- 
centrate and glow about the person in whom they are 
seen, and the appreciation of their excellence grows in 
the soul until it is dazzled by their glory and worth, and 
their light makes the earth and all things radiant, lie 



62 THE MISSING SENSE. 

who so loves it knew before that all happiness ought to 
attach to goodness ; now he knows that goodness is in 
itself desirable above all things for its own sake, and he 
would follow it, if need be, at the sacrifice of all other 
joys. His soul sees all the qualities that are lovely, shin- 
ing to him with a perfection far above his attainments 
or hopes, measured only by his ability to conceive of ex- 
cellence. 

Then all his thoughts and all his acts have reference to 
his beloved ideal. It takes entire possession of him. 
There is no other good to him but to do all things in his 
power to harmonize himself with and, so far as he can, 
attain the excellence of character which he sees, or 
imagines, and loves in his ideal, and whether seen or 
imagined it is real to him. But, like the rainbow, that 
excellence is ever out of his reach, always hopelessly un- 
attainable but ever leading him to better things. In its 
light all earthly goods — wealth, honor, power, and all 
that could pertain to them — grow worthless and dull, 
and are despised, while he knows, with a conscious 
certainty, that his good, which he loves and follows, is 
forever good, and the love of it could fill him forever 
with radiant happiness and ineffable joy. 

While this light is upon him he walks among his fel- 
low-men as if he did not see them ; the things that engage 
their attention have no interest for him ; he is living as 
if in another world, and in this he is for the time of no 
use. In the light of such an experience, however, he will 
evermore know something of the blessedness which the 
human soul is capable of receiving, but which, without 
it, he never could have guessed. 

At the same time, if a fellow human being is the mir- 
ror from which all this heavenly light is reflected to him, 
he is tortured by the fact that his ideal is beyond his 



MAN AND HIS MEANING. 63 

reach, and that he cannot win the love which his soul 
craves in response to his own, that he cannot even hope 
to do so. If it were not so, if the embodiment of his 
ideal were attainable, and the longed-for response could 
be won, the ideal would then be destroyed, the mirror 
broken. The light which was so beautiful beyond all 
things in advance of him, like the rainbow, when it is 
reached would disappear. Inaccessibility and unattain- 
ability are a necessary element in such an experience, 
but in them the soul tastes a bitterness of woe, a horror 
of darkness, infinite and eternal, as it believes, which can 
be compared only to the brightness and glory and heav- 
enly joy which the same experience makes known. In 
this experience, which is spiritual, though coming to 
one in the material body, as in the natural world, heights 
are measured by depths, lights by shadows, joy by an- 
guish, good by evil. 

Nothing is perceived except by contrast with its oppo- 
site, nor can we conceive how it possibly could be other- 
wise. This is one reason why the existence of evil is 
necessary in a universe that is ruled by good. 

In the light of an experience like this, while the good 
seems beautiful and to be desired before all things, every 
taint of moral evil becomes unutterably loathsome. Such 
an experience saves from sin and the love of it, builds a 
man up and makes him steadfast in the good. This is 
the value of the love and pursuit of an ideal. 

Some have found such an ideal in Christ, as is shown 
by many of the hymns in use, and by expressions current 
in religious phraseology. As usually employed these ex- 
pressions are extravagant language, but they must have 
had their origin in emotions of which they are the natural 
expression. Happy are they who can find such an ideal 
there, for in that case the bitterness of the experience is 



64 THE MISSING SENSE. 

absent and the brightness of the good finds its counter- 
foil in the evil of the world. Some cannot conceive their 
ideal except in a person seen, and to these, if they are 
true to God's truth, pure with His purity, loving the 
good and following it faithfully, God can hold a mirror 
before the eyes of their soul which shall reflect to them 
His beauty and glory. " The pure in heart shall see 
God." 

Here we may notice the difficulty which one experi- 
ences in making thoughts understood where those to 
whom he would convey them cannot draw from their 
own experience the like. 

The soul knows no other name for such an experience 
as this than love ; yet the soul that has felt such knows 
that the one element which many regard as essential, in- 
deed the chief constituent of love — namely, sexual desire, 
is not only not present in it, but is absolutely incompati- 
ble w T ith such love, and repugnant to the soul that feels it. 
When that is present the love is absent. Let it not be 
thought that we are speaking here of that love on which 
marriages are usually and happily founded. There is a 
love that is human, and there is a love that is super- 
human. We are here considering the latter — a love 
which, having its proper object recognized, would liter- 
ally fulfil the commandment : " Thou shalt love the 
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, 
and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength ;" and 
Ave have no conviction deeper than that such a love as 
this can never rest finally without disappointment and 
destruction in any other object than God. What, indeed, 
best represents God to us children of the earth but our 
brightest ideal of all excellence, personified in all its ap- 
propriate beauty and harmony ? It is to such an ideali- 
zation of excellence only that such a love can be given 



MAN AND HIS MEANING. G5 

and such a love is the fulfilment of the law. Human 
loves find their object in persons who have many faults 
known and recognized, but such a love as this can go out 
only to one that is, or seems, wholly, brightly, and super- 
latively good. Most people in this life never reach such 
an experience as this, nor anything that can well be com- 
pared to it. The world may not think such an experience 
quite sane. Measured by the plane of the world's life 
and pursuits it is not, for a man, while living in such a 
state of soul, is oblivious to the world and what the world 
cares for, except in a secondary way as he can use it in 
his soul-absorbing struggle to approximate his ideal. 
While in this experience he is not fitted for the world, 
but if he is true and brave, carrying himself soberly in 
the light, and enduring to the uttermost in the darkness 
that follows it, gradually the experience will be removed 
from him. 

The brightness will grow dim, the shadows will fade, 
the heights and the depths will be levelled and filled in the 
distance, but the memory of it will remain. Sure with 
a certainty, the strongest he can know, that the glory of 
the love which he feels slipping from his possession is a 
good far transcending any other that he ever may know, 
he will pray God to keep him in it forever, even though 
he must remain forever desolate, loving the heavenly 
light and glory from the presence of which he is banished. 
He will pray God that it may be restored to him even 
under these conditions for long years after it is gone. 
Yet time will bring its healing. The memory will re- 
main, but he will learn to know the meaning of the ex- 
perience as he could not know it while it was present 
with him. Now there is room in him for the loves and 
the pleasures, the joys and the sorrows that properly 
pertain to life on earth ; but he knows now that the ex- 



66 THE MISSING SENSE. 

cellence which he so loved was superhuman, that it was 
but reflected to him and not properly belonging to the 
one in whom it seemed personified. He knows that, 
since nothing could come to his soul which it was not so 
constituted as to be able to receive, he has realized some- 
thing of what heavenly joy may be. He knows that for 
this life that joy has vanished before him like the water 
from Tantalus's thirsty lips, but that it belongs to another 
life, where he may enjoy it in its fulness forever. And 
what is possible to him is possible to others also. A 
great lesson has been taught him that will ever after- 
ward shed its light on many things that otherwise must 
have remained in darkness. 

Every fact that comes to the knowledge of man has 
truth behind it, which it is the function of reason to per- 
ceive and make known. 

Unusual facts are messengers of truths not prominent 
in the knowledge of men. 

In the last few pages we have reviewed much experi- 
ence, some of it common and some of it unusual, but 
that only in degree, it being a continuation in the same 
line of what is common. 

That in regard to the unusual we speak from experi- 
ence, and that, therefore, what has been said is fact to be 
studied and not fancy to be set aside, of course we hardly 
need say. The experience thus related, like all things 
that have a beginning, must have a cause. If its cause 
were in its subject, then it can put in him nothing that 
was not there in some form before it. Though even if 
its cause were in its subject, it must have had a cause that 
put it there ; and what is universally found in man can 
come from no other source than the cause and creator of 
man himself, which is God. In this case, however, it is 
part of the experience that its subject tries to retain it 



MAtf A$D HIS MEAKIKG. 67 

and is not able. He desires above all things to restore 
it, and cannot do so in the slightest degree. 

This goes to indicate that its origin is not in its subject, 
certainly not under the control of his will. But the most 
marked feature of the experience we are studying is, 
that it conveys to man knowledge of things of which 
without it he was ignorant, and leads his thought and his 
soul to heights and excellences not only beyond his 
reach, but beyond the possibilities of his imagination to 
conceive without it. Hence its cause is not in its sub- 
ject, and, it being a bright vision of superhuman good, its 
cause can be no other than the source of that good, which 
is God. Again, the perception of the exceeding worth 
and excellence of that good, being limited only by the 
capacity of the soul to perceive it, which capacity is 
itself given and not inherent in man, that excellence as 
perceived can by no possibility exceed in any respect the 
excellence of its cause. It cannot equal it. Hence, 
God is good and lovely, and the knowledge of Him, and 
conformity to His character, and His love and approval, 
are desiraMe beyond any conception of the fact that 
He has ever given to a weak and imperfect man, no 
matter how much that man may have been changed 
from his common and normal state of mind as fitted for 
the earth and the duties of earthlv life in order to re- 
ceive it. 

But of man himself what does all this teach us ? We 
have traced his history from his origin in a material body, 
which God alone could have built. We have seen him 
placed in varied circumstances as to surroundings and 
possessions, but in regard to man himself we have found 
differences of three kinds only : 1. Differences in char- 
acter. 2. Differences in intelligence. 3. Differences in 



68 THE MISSING SENSE. 

power. Really these three classes are but two, since in- 
telligence itself is a form of power. 

We have seen that man is a growing spirit, forming 
character, and cultivating with more or less diligence his 
intelligence and his power. We have seen that charac- 
ter consists in the tastes and distastes, likes and dislikes, 
loves and hatreds that form the motives of conduct, and 
not in conduct itself. We have seen also that man is at 
all times a resultant of all his past. This is true in re- 
gard to character, intelligence, and power, but especially 
in regard to character. We have seen that merit and 
demerit pertain to character ; that right character consists 
in the love of what is good and the abhorrence of its op- 
posite ; that to the enlightened understanding the good is 
for its own sake desirable above all things, at any cost ; 
that to love and follow it ennobles, beautifies, and builds 
up the human spirit, and that to love and follow what 
is not good is destructive to man body and spirit ; that it 
tends to make him an object of loathing to all healthy 
souls, and that, while it disfigures him both in body and 
spirit, it also shortens his bodily life. 

We cannot fail to recognize also that what an intelli- 
gent agent knowingly does is done for a purpose. And, 
as we have seen that each individual human being is 
necessarily the creation of an intelligent agent by special 
act, which agent can be no other than God, the life of 
man is given for a purpose. 

But that the purpose of life should be accomplished and 
passed, while the life itself is but just begun, is absurd ; 
and since man is a spirit whose life here is to continue 
into life under other conditions, that purpose must be 
found pertaining to the man himself, and not in the 
temporary conditions pertaining to his life in the body. 
But when the things that necessarily pertain to the pres- 



MAN AND HIS MEANING. 69 

ent life only are removed the spirit alone is left, and in- 
spirit differences of character, intelligence, and power 
only are found. 

From all these considerations the conclusion is evident 
that to produce right character and to equip it with in- 
telligence and power is the true purpose of life. 

This purpose is also seen to be a sufficient reason and 
justification for itself and for all the conditions necessary 
or best adapted to promote it. 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 



We have made ourselves certain that there is a God 
who has created us. 

Recognizing His power and His intelligence in the 
creation of living forms and the conduct of the processes 
of life, and seeing the necessity of a like cause to account 
for all other processes going on in the order of the uni- 
verse, we reasonably conclude also that He has made, 
rules, cares for, and sustains the universe, in every part, 
at all times. He has made man what he is, and has given 
him such faculties of perception and understanding as 
he possesses. 

From the nature and history of the human under- 
standing, and from what has been brought to our own 
consciousness, we have become certain, too, that God is 
good beyond our power to realize that fact, and that all 
evil is therefore loathsome to Him, and in every respect 
opposed to His nature. Hence in regard to God we have 
a right to reason from what ought to be to what is, to 
assume that if God ought to do anything, that thing He 
does ; and if He ought not to do anything, that thing He 
will not do. 

Our range of mental vision is limited ; distant con- 
sequences fade and vanish in the sight of our under- 
standing like distant objects in visual perspective ; we 
lose sight of the necessary consequences that must 
follow if things were ordered as we would wish they 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 71 

were ; hence, much that exists in the universe by God's 
permission and according to His order, that seems to us 
evil, we would wish were otherwise. It is evil, hateful 
alike to God and man so long as man's soul is tuned in 
harmony with God and the good, but it is necessary to 
the good, and it can be shown to be so. Let it not be 
supposed that what seems evil in man's sight is good in 
the sight of God. If this be assumed, our thought is in- 
stantly turned into confusion and our language loses its 
meaning. No ! "What is in man comes from God, who 
made him ; hence, man's good must be God's good, and 
man's evil God's evil, the same in kind and quality, 
differing only in the degree in which their qualities are 
perceived. 

How, then, shall the existence and the power of 
evil in the universe be reconciled with the absolute 
rule of a God who is wholly good, who created that uni- 
verse and who loathes the evil that is in it ? 

In the purpose of life, as ascertained in our last chapter, 
which purpose is a complete justification of itself and of 
all the conditions necessary or best adapted to promote 
it, we have a key to the problem, a key that solves it 
perfectly and satisfactorily. 

The existence of a spiritual person — and there is no 
other kind of person — having character, intelligence, and 
power, implies the necessity of freedom to that person to 
act according to his own will, self-originated, of his own 
choice. If such a person have not such freedom, then 
he does not of himself have either character or power, 
he does not act but is only acted upon, and neither merit 
nor blame attaches to him for what is done through him 
but not by him. He is then as a tool, an inanimate 
thing. Moral freedom, without which moral character 
could not exist, implies the privilege of following the 



72 THE MISSING SENSE. 

good or not according to choice, and that there should 
be conflicting motives balancing each other between 
which the person is free to choose. But not to follow the 
good is to follow the evil ; and that motives to the evil 
must exist, and with power sufficient to balance those that 
move one to the good, implies not only the necessity of 
the existence of the evil, but of its existence with great 
power. 

Is it thought that God, being almighty, might have 
ordered the universe otherwise and yet have developed 
character as well ? But even omnipotence cannot be 
self-contradictory, and God Himself could not have so 
ordered the universe that man should have moral freedom 
and yet that the good alone should be possible to him. 
Bat he might, perhaps, it will be thought, have left him 
freedom among different goods while yet he was excluded 
from the evil ; yes, but that would have excluded him 
from moral freedom, hence from moral character, and 
from the dignity and nobility and merit which pertain 
to it. If man were excluded from the evil he w T ould 
thereby be excluded from the good. 

Again, the purpose of life is to equip character with 
intelligence. But intelligence can find no object in uni- 
formity, can know nothing except in contrast with its 
opposite. Height could not exist without depth. We 
could not be aware of the existence, even, of light if 
there were no shade, no variation in its intensity, and 
good itself would be meaningless to us if evil were not 
known. 

Such is the nature of intelligence in man that nothing 
can be known without a corresponding knowledge of its 
opposite, nor can we conceive how it could be otherwise. 
That which does not exist cannot be known. Hence the 
existence of intelligence itself, having a knowledge of 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. ?3 

good, demands the existence of evil, and that evil should 
lack none of its hateful qualities, that it should be 
hideous, loathsome and destructive, in a universe created 
and ruled by a God who is wholly good. 

In this respect, too, we have a right to infer that 
what is true of the intelligence of man is also true of that 
of God. Since the intelligence of man is derived from 
and created by God, the difference between His intelli- 
gence and that of man is a difference of degree not of 
kind. The greater the degree in which man perceives 
the quality of goodness, the more vivid his perception 
of the opposite quality ; hence no increase of degree in 
intelligence could change this necessity, and God Him- 
self must know evil if He knows good. 

Again, the purpose of life is to equip character with 
power. But power implies resistance. Physical power 
is developed by the resistance of material substances upon 
which it acts, and that resistance is equal to the power 
exerted. Without resistance it could not manifest itself , 
and it is only by repeated exercise against resistance that 
physical strength is developed. We are equally conscious 
that moral power is developed in a similar way. Resist- 
ance to a motive tending to lead a person into wrong 
conduct not only tests his moral strength but increases 
it, and to such exercise its growth is due. 

Right character can resist and be in antagonism with 
only what is wrong ; hence without the existence of wrong, 
moral power could not be exerted, could not even exist. 

Thus it is seen that, in every phase of personal exist- 
ence, dignity and worth, from infinity down to the van- 
ishing point of moral character and responsibility, the ex- 
istence of evil in the universe is necessary to the good, 
necessary to the existence of moral character, to its intel- 
ligence and to its power. 



74 THE MISSING SENSE. 

That evil exists and has power in the universe which 
God has made and governs, does not imply that God is 
responsible for the evil in such a way as to be tainted 
with it ; for He has made it a first principle of the intelli- 
gence of man that evil is hateful, to be loathed, and 
shunned, and resisted ;. and what He has put into the in- 
telligence of man must be in His own intelligence also. 
But the character that loathes, shuns, and resists the evil 
is to that extent not tainted with it. 

The fountain may be judged by the stream, and the 
qualities of the unvitiated human spirit must be the same 
in kind but inferior in degree to those of the God who 
created it. Hence a moral opposite to be resisted is a 
necessary condition of moral power even with God Him- 
self. 

That those who follow the good and thereby develop 
right character and merit happiness should themselves 
feel the power and the pain of evil, is a necessity to their 
own growth in right character, intelligence, and power. 

But since to the good contact with evil in any form 
is painfnl and moral evil is loathsome, it would never 
voluntarily be incurred, and the character of the spirit- 
ual person, with its intelligence and power, would, if it 
could choose its own conditions, remain forever unde- 
veloped. Hence for the development of right character 
and its equipment with intelligence and power, it is 
necessary that it should be placed in a world where it 
will be in conflict with evil, and that evil should be 
given a considerable degree of power over the good. 

The extent to which this affliction of the rightly dis- 
posed, by subjection to the evil, is best for each individual 
can never be known by the person so afflicted, but it is 
wisely left to the God who rules all things. 

Hence the affliction of the well-disposed with evil is not 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 75 

to be regarded as a punishment, nor as an evidence of 
neglect on the part of a good God. nor as an indication 
that evil is in any degree master in the universe, but as a 
matter of discipline, necessary to the best good of the 
person afflicted, even though that affliction should go to 
the extent of removing him painfully to another world. 

The converse fact that those who yield to, follow, and 
conform themselves with the evil, and thereby develop 
bad character, prosper in their undertakings quite as well 
as or better than those who follow and conform them- 
selves to the good, is not to be taken as an evidence that 
injustice rules, and that justice is without power in the 
universe, but rather as a necessary feature of a world de- 
signed as a school in which to develop character, and in 
w T hich for that purpose good and evil must have balanced 
powers, and in which good persons must themselves, for 
the development of their own characters, necessarily be 
subject in many respects to the power of evil. 

What is this evil ? Whence does it arise ? Our study 
will be more complete and satisfactory if, as well as we 
can, we make an analysis of it, though we cannot hope to 
make that analysis perfect. The variations of final form 
which evil assumes are numberless, and the enormity of 
its development is limitless, but its roots are few, and, so 
far as they are positive qualities, in their place, under 
proper restraints, they are not evil. The following, we 
think, will classify according to origin very nearly, if not 
quite, all its forms : 

1, Selfishness, giving rise to desire 

for possessions regardless of others •, 

for dominion over others ; 

for pleasure at the cost of others. 

These give rise to all kinds of aggressions, encroach- 



to* 



7G THE MISSING SENSE. 

ments, and crimes, from the most trivial fraud for profit 
to the wickedest and most gigantic wars that the world 
has known. They also give rise to secondary appetites, 
tastes, and passions, so monstrous as to seem insane, such 
as the miser's greed for money, which leads him to 
forego the benefits for which he might reasonably desire 
it, and live in want that he may hoard it — his greed 
has thus overgrown, and buried the more reasonable 
desire from which it sprang — and cruelty, a monstrous 
distortion of spirit, which causes one to take pleasure in 
the sight of pain, and even to inflict torment in order to 
enjoy that pleasure. This, perhaps the most hideously 
abnormal vice that man can acquire, we believe to be an 
outgrowth of familiarity with suffering inflicted, though 
distasteful, in order to gratify the selfish desires for gain 
and dominion. Happily in our age and nation this vice 
in any strongly marked degree is rare. 

2. The emotions, which, if not properly restrained and 
guided, give rise to vices of temper which need not be 
specified. 

3. The physical appetites, some of them largely artifi- 
cial, which, if indulged without control, give rise to all 
physical vices. These vices attack primarily the persons 
that acquire and indulge them, and they are destructive 
to their victims in body, character, intelligence, and 
power. They also defile the surroundings of those who 
indulge them, and thus inflict evil on the innocent. These 
three — -selfishness, emotion, and appetite — we believe to 
be all the positive roots of evil originally and normally 
implanted in human nature ; and these in their uses are 
not evil, being necessary to the existence and develop- 
ment of the human race. These, though differing totally 
in their nature, are positive in that they are liable to give 
rise to moral deformity by their excess. 



THE PKOBLEM OF EVIL. 77 

Throughout this treatise we have used the word sel- 
fishness to signify those desires and impulses which 
prompt every normally constituted person to seek his 
own welfare, and pleasure, and advancement. The word 
is commonly used to signify such an excessive or per- 
verted growth of these desires and impulses as leads to 
the disregard of the rights, and pleasures, and welfare of 
others. Used in the latter sense, selfishness is evil in 
itself ; but in this sense it is a name for a perversion and 
excessive development only, of a principle which normally 
and necessarily exists in all, while the principle itself is 
left unnamed. This sense of the word is colloquially 
correct enough, but it is not precise enough for philo- 
sophical use. 

By positive roots of evil, in this discussion, we mean 
qualities or faculties which have real existence in man as 
normally constituted, which are liable to give rise to evil 
by perversion or excessive development. Evil in the 
character of a man having in this sense a positive root is 
naturally referred to as a quality in excess, as, " He is too 
much devoted to his own interests," " lie is of too 
quick and violent temper," or " He is too much under 
the control of his appetites." Evil having what is here 
characterized as a negative root, on the contrary, is natu- 
rally referred to as a lack, a distortion of character by the 
deficiency of some quality needed to make a man what 
he should be. The negative roots of evil are : 

1. Lack of love for others, from which arises failure 
to properly control the selfish desires. 

2. Lack of love for the good, which should give a de- 
sire to shape our conduct in harmony with all that is 
good, and pure, and beautiful. From this lack arises 
failure to control the emotions and appetites, and thence 
the origin of moral and physical vices. 



78 THE MISSING SENSE. 

3. Lack of love for truth. This allows lying and every 
form of deceit to be practised. These in turn become 
the instrument and the disguise of nearly every form of 
moral evil. This constitutes dishonesty, as we use the 
term, and it is the soil in which all moral evil is propa- 
gated and grows into enormity. In the open light of 
truth all moral evil would shrivel and die, as the mildew 
and fungi, generated in dampness and darkness, would 
shrivel and die in the glare of the summer sunlight. 

4. Lack of knowledge. This has given rise to many 
and grievous evils, and it has not yet lost its power ; but 
so far as the evil originating from this root is uncontam- 
inated from others, it is not moral evil. 

Perhaps the worst evils springing out of this root that 
the world has known are those arising from intolerance 
of opinion and the desire to coerce thought and belief — 
offences of which many honest and well-meaning men 
have been guilty. 

The negative roots of evil are the reverse of the posi- 
tive roots of good, all of which are originally and normally 
implanted in human nature, together with the knowledge 
of the obligation to cultivate them. So that the only re- 
sponsibility that could be charged against God for moral 
evil is that, after enlightening him as to his duty, He 
has not interfered with man's freedom to cultivate and 
use, or not, the good and useful faculties which He has 
planted in him. 

From this view of the matter it is again clear that God 
could not have excluded man from the evil without de- 
priving him of freedom, and so of character, intelligence, 
and power. 

Evil is disorder in the universe, disorder tending to 
destruction, disorder which merits penalty, as the uni- 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 79 

versa! conviction of mankind testifies. And since order 
rules in the universe, and ever must rule, evil, which is at 
war with order, carries in itself the penalty of being for- 
ever in conflict with and forever under restraint by the 
power that rules ; a conflict and restraint that must be 
forever painful to the votaries of evil ; and this penalty 
is forever necessary and just. 

There are two phases of the penalty attached to evil 
conduct and character. The first is that evil character 
is of itself deformity of a most unhappy nature. And 
when a man puts into his life evil where he should have 
put in good, he adds that deformity to the sum total of 
his life, whose resultant he must be forevermore. 

If he afterward forsakes the evil and lives for the good, 
he then adds goodness and beauty to his character, which 
is himself ; the evil which he has put into his life will bear 
a less and less proportion to the whole, and as a person 
he may and will become good ; not so good, however, 
as if he had never put evil into his life, and through all 
eternity he never can be. Since during a greater or less 
portion of his time for development his progress has 
been in the wrong direction and his growth has been 
into deformity, he has made a double loss. If he had 
simply failed to make progress in right character, intel- 
ligence, and power, he would have lost what eternity 
could never make up to him ; how doubly, then, has he 
lost when he not only failed to make progress, but actu- 
ally retrograded and built deformity into his being 

One's peace and, in a great measure, his happiness, de- 
pends on his harmony with his surroundings. But in 
the world where good and evil are mingled they are and 
ever must be at war. One cannot harmonize himself 
with both. If his effort is to harmonize his life with 



80 THE MISSING SENSE. 

what is good, then he is at war with the evil, and the 
character he is building is good. If, seeking peace and 
favor from what often seem to be the powers which have 
at disposal most of earth's benefits, he conducts himself 
in such a manner as to harmonize his life with what is 
evil, then he is at war with the good, and is building bad 
character. And if he shall ever in all eternity turn him- 
self to the good that character will stand in his way and 
be wrought into his being, not as loss only, but as de- 
formity and weakness. The longer and more active his 
service of evil, the greater, more hideous, and more un- 
happy that deformity and weakness must be. This is 
eternal punishment for sin, and there is no escape from 
it. 

Is there, then, no forgiveness ? 

Yes. And that instantly and freely. If a man is at 
peace with evil he is at war with good, and therefore at 
war with God. If he is at war with evil he is at peace 
with good, and, therefore, at peace with God, and this 
without regard to the man's previous life or the de- 
formities and weaknesses that he may have built into him- 
self in that life. This is forgiveness, and it stands ready 
and waiting for any man or any spirit, the moment that 
spirit will make peace with God and the good. 

God has put it into the soul of man to know that 
though wickedness merits condemnation, and punish- 
ment, and forcible restraint, yet the indignation, and 
hostility, and unforgiveness which is justly due to the 
man who is wicked and intending wickedness should 
cease when the wickedness ceases — that is, as soon as 
his intent and his effort is right. 

Though a man may have been wantonly injured, so 
soon as he knows that the one who inflicted this injury 
upon him is heartily sorry for having doue so, earnestly 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 81 

desirous to do all in liis power to make amends for the 
wrong he has done, and thoroughly determined never 
again to do the like, now hating such wrongs, the man 
is less than human who would not then forgive the one 
who had wronged him, and would not, heart and hand, do 
all in his power to help the poor wrongdoer in his new 
and better life. 

Any excusable hesitancy on the part of the injured man 
to assume relations of peace and friendship in such a case 
with the one w T ho had injured him, would be due to a 
justifiable doubt as to the genuineness of his repentance 
and desire to do right. This among men justifies a test- 
ing time of w r aiting, but with God there can be no doubt. 

If, being convinced that the man who had WTonged 
him had really forsaken wrongdoing and was now try- 
ing his best to do right and serve the good, the man who 
was injured now refuses to forgive the wrongdoer, and 
follows him with hatred, seeking to inflict injury on him 
in retaliation for what he himself suffered, the wicked- 
ness is now reversed. The man who will not forgive 
has himself become the wrongdoer, the monster with evil 
intent in his heart, while the repentant one, who is doing 
all in his power for the right, merits sympathy and ap- 
proval, 

Man knows this to be true for the same reason that he 
knows right and wrong from the beginning, because 
God has put that knowledge into the human under- 
standing. 

If human laws against crime do not make provision 
for this principle, nor seem to accord with it, it is because 
genuine reform cannot be anticipated or recognized, 
and because any legal provisions for the setting aside of 
penalties in such cases would be taken advantage of by 
criminals who are not repentant ; the law would lose 



82 THE MISSING SENSE. 

much of its power to restrain crime, and society would 
not be protected. The penalties of human law must have 
their sanction in society's right of self-defence, not in 
the merits and demerits of abstract justice, which are 
necessarily beyond the reach of human knowledge. 

If, then, it would be wrong for man to refuse forgive- 
ness to the wrongdoer who is genuinely repentant, we 
may be sure that God will not be guilty of that wrong ; 
but the man who, by previous harmony with and service 
of what is evil, has wrought deformity, and weakness, 
and foolishness into his being, and is now trying to con- 
form to and harmonize himself with what is good, has the 
pitying love of God and all good spirits to help him in 
his new service, and to do all that can be done to help 
him to grow out of tiie deformities which evil has 
wrought into him. The man may be warped by the 
service of evil into a monstrosity. The marks of evil 
conformed to and not resisted may have become his very 
features ; but if that man ceases to serve evil, and makes 
war upon it, giving his allegiance and his services to what 
is good, he is changed, and is evil no longer. 

And this change is in man's power ; he can guide his 
conduct according to his knowledge, even though that 
knowledge requires that he should act in opposition to his 
tastes and desires, and his pernicious evil loves, just as 
men can and do swallow medicines which their taste 
rebels against in the conviction that they will be bene- 
fited thereby. If, according to his knowledge of the 
good, the man who has followed evil until his tastes 
and desires crave the evil, does this, the old loves will 
lose their power and new and better ones will arise to 
help him. 



CHAPTER V. 



DESTINY. 



Our study lias led naturally to the question, What is 
to be the result of all this ? 

Does the great hereafter hold in store eternal hope of 
happiness and good for every soul, or only for some ? 

This question must be considered, but an essential ele- 
ment involved in the answer seems to be indeterminate. 

This much we have a right to consider established : 
God is good ; and since God is good He will not close the 
way that would lead any spirit to the good either here 
or hereafter. The privilege must ever be open to every 
spirit to ally itself with the good if it chooses to do so, 
and with goodness, and harmony with order, peace and 
happiness must follow. So long as there is a lingering 
remnant of love for the good in any soul, God must 
stand ready to help and cherish and cultivate that love, 
to lend His encouragement and help to the soul to fol- 
low it. He will never extinguish what is good and leave 
the evil in any spirit. If God did this He would not be 
good. And no matter how deformed, disfigured, dis- 
graced, and crippled by service of evil, there must be 
eternal hope for every spirit that wishes to be better. 

Will every spirit wish to be better ? The whole ques- 
tion of eternal destiny turns on the answer to this ques- 
tion, and we are incompetent to answer it. 

To us it seems a necessity of every intelligence that 
right should be preferred to wrong, and good to evil. 



84 THE MISSING SENSE. 

There is much in the lives of those who seem to follow 
wickedness from choice that is beyond our comprehen- 
sion, but, so far as we are able to judge, there always 
remains the fundamental preference of good rather than 
evil, no matter how that preference may be buried by 
the growth of evil habits and evil loves over it and 
about it. 

If this, our judgment, is correct, if this preference of 
good to evil is a fundamental, essential, necessary ele- 
ment of the human spirit, of the man himself, then, 
while we have found eternal punishment for every sin, 
we have also found eternal hope for every soul. If, as 
some maintain, those wdio follow the evil come to prefer 
the evil to the good fundamentally, of free choice, then 
we see no hope for such souls. "Which of these tw T o 
judgments of fact may be correct, each reader is as com- 
petent to decide as the writer. None of us can judge 
the motives of others except by interpreting their con- 
duct by our own consciousness. 

Let us think, if we can, what the result would be in 
the world if suddenly every one of its inhabitants could 
receive that spiritual sense, the possibility and power of 
which was considered in our first chapter, by w T hich all 
secrets should become impossible, in the range of which 
spiritual character and habits should be form and feat- 
ures ; feelings and emotions, attitudes ; and thoughts and 
fancies, acts ; visible to all without possibility of conceal- 
ment ; so that each one should see all others perfectly as 
they are, and should, at the same time, see himself as 
others see him ; so that neither distance nor intervening 
objects should be any obstacle to his perceptions. Grant 
earth's inhabitants at the same time perfect freedom to 
go where they chose, not even confining them to the 
planet, freedom from all the needs, the discomforts and 



DESTIKY. 85 

the liabilities to injury to which the body is subject, and 
take from them only the power which these gifts would 
necessarily remove — the power to destroy each other. 

What a reassorting of society there would be ! 

How each one, aided by his new sense, would seek out 
the company of those whose thoughts agreed with his 
own, who loved what he loved, and hated what he 
hated ! 

What a shrinking away in shame there would be of 
those who had relied on appearances for the respect 
which they had claimed, but whose inmost selves were 
evil, now that their masks are removed ! 

How they would flee away from the presence of those 
who are better than they, while they would associate with 
others like themselves ! Yet this, it seems to us, is what 
will probably happen to us all when the material form in 
which we have begun our existence is cast off. 

That, says one, is not a pleasant thought. I would not 
want to go to heaven if that was to be the situation. 
Well, then, my friend, you would not go there ; you 
would go where you felt most at home ; but if that is the 
way it strikes you, you need the thought. Be sure that 
kind of a revelation is coming, and it is the privilege and 
the duty of each one of us so to live that such a revela- 
tion shall have no terrors for us. We ought to hate 
/ everything in us that we want to hide. There is nothing 
so despicable as a secret ; and when one has made it a 
part of the alphabet of his thinking that every secret 
must be exposed in the open light to the sight of all, he 
will hate secrecy as few things are hated ; secrecy in 
the cover of which things grow in his soul, the existence 
of which he is ashamed of, until they have crowded out 
/ the good, and disfigured, and degraded, and disgraced 
him. Then the secrecy must be dissolved, while the 



86 THE MISSING SENSE. 

shameful things that have grown under its cover remain 
to be seen of all. Then away with secrecy, and let us 
give all diligence to uprooting the evil things which it 
has sheltered. 

In this world the body in a great measure conceals the 
spirit. We have seen in some degree how many evils 
spring from this, how much to be desired it is that we 
should make the realities that are in us correspond to the 
appearances that we wish to present, how good it is to 
have the appearances and the realities agree. But if 
this covering of the spiritual attitude and act were not 
possible, the good and the evil could not live in peace to- 
gether for a day or an hour. The man with evil in his 
soul pays goodness the compliment of simulating it. 
The man who loathes the evil that the other entertains, 
though he may see through the counterfeit, lets him pass 
at his assumed value, concealing himself the thought 
which the detection of the counterfeit puts into him, and 
so the two do business together. If this mutual conceal- 
ment were not possible each would be insulted by the 
other's presence, and they would fight. Hence, if the 
spiritual sense were given us, the enlarged freedom 
must accompany it or society would be at an end. As 
society is now constituted it would be at an end in any 
case. 

Hence, again, in order that the world should be fitted 
for the development of character the bodily veil must be 
allowed the young and growing spirit. Freedom is 
necessary, and without that veil even freedom could not 
exist ; the use we make of our freedom is what is all- 
important to us. This is a condition for the development 
of character in its early stages which we have reason to 
believe will not be afforded at any later stage of the 
spirit's existence, and this is another reason why the loss 



DESTINY. 87 

of opportunities which life on earth affords may be irre- 
trievably disastrous. 

That there must, however, be provisions for the de- 
velopment of character in the hereafter we may be sure, 
since very few of us leave this life wholly good or wholly 
evil. 

What is good in man, God, being good, must for- 
ever approve, and help, and bless, while the evil in him 
must ever be at war with God, subject to His disap- 
proval, and bearing in itself its penalties. The evil must 
be cast out of the man, or the man, himself casting out all 
good impulses and desires from his being, must himself 
be cast out with the evil. He cannot continue forever 
partly evil and partly good ; one principle or the other 
must conquer and rule in every spirit, receiving its un- 
divided allegiance. 

But of the new conditions for the growth of character, 
what must be the effect ? 

We have a right to assume that since God is good He 
has ordered these conditions to favor the good as much 
as is possible consistent with freedom. We have seen 
that freedom is the first necessity to the development of 
character here ; but our freedom here is very limited, and 
its limitations, in the beginnings of character, are as 
necessary to its development as freedom itself. When 
we leave this life we have abundant reason to believe 
that we graduate into a larger freedom. That larger 
freedom, as we have just seen, would itself result in the 
voluntary assortment of spirits into societies, each of 
whose members would resemble all the others in qual- 
ity. 

Much of the evil that men allow to grow up in their 
souls is tolerated there because it is hidden ; but this se- 
crecy, we have a right to assume, will be removed, and 



88 THE MISSING SENSE. 

with its removal whatever of hatred there is in the soul 
for its own evil may naturally be turned into active hos- 
tility to it and effort toward its opposite good. But at 
the same time this removal of secrecy and increase of 
freedom must have resulted in the withdrawal of each 
spirit from the society of those not affected with the same 
evil. 

Will this withdrawal offset the beneficial effect of 
the removal of secrecy and result in the reconciliation of 
each spirit with the evil that is in it ? Will this depend 
on the degree of that evil, or will it depend wholly on 
the good qualities in each sjMrit which must necessarily 
be opposed to the evil ? Largely, we think, on the lat- 
ter. The probability is that the larger freedom will re- 
sult in the determination of character in the direction of 
its choice with headlong speed. 

The temptations w 7 hich lead men into many evils here 
pertain to the body only, and we have a right to assume 
that from these temptations death will free the man. 
The evil character which his vices have built, with its 
loathsome deformities, will remain, of course ; but many a 
man who has yielded to vicious practices until the chains 
of vice have bound him, struggles against such vices in 
vain, hating them though he yields to them even here in 
this life. For such we cannot doubt but the life to come 
holds promise of better things. 

The soul that loves the good is happy in that love. 
That God will lead that soul from joy to brighter joy 
and from good to better and higher good we have abun- 
dant assurance. Right character bears its own title to 
heaven so clear that it may easily be read, and need not 
be doubted by any reasonable soul. Evil creates its own 
hell, and its votaries will choose it voluntarily. This 
being the case, we have no right to assume that God, who 



DESTINY. 89 

is good, will create any other hell, or make that any worse 
than the evil that spirits voluntarily entertain in their 
own freedom makes it. God is good, and His effort 
must be toward the betterment of all, even of the dwellers 
in hell. But the freedom of each spirit must remain, and 
so long as a spirit chooses the evil it is evil, and the 
penalties of evil must be upon it. It must suffer the 
torments that its evil necessarily incurs until it forsakes 
the evil ; if it will never forsake it, then forever ; and it 
must suffer the consequences of devotion to evil in spir- 
itual deformity, and weakness, and loss, even after the 
evil is forsaken. However, when duration has no limits 
there is no limit to the possibilities any spirit may attain 
provided that its tendency is persistently in their di- 
rection. 



CHxlPTEE VI. 

AUTHORITY AND TRUTH. 

The mind of man is able to perceive truth in a meas- 
ure as it is prepared for it. 

The reason that is in man is the faculty, God-given, 
by which he is to know the truth and distinguish it 
from the false ; but he cannot reach out and grasp all 
truth at pleasure, without limit. He is weak, his mental 
eyesight imperfect, the grasp of his mind feeble, hence 
his notions are full of error. The truth must be won lit- 
tle by little. 

When the mind has perceived a truth and taken it in 
and assimilated it, that truth sheds a new light on other 
things, and increases the mind's ability to perceive and 
grasp other truths. That truth has contributed to the 
mind's growth, and to this growth no man has ever yet 
found any indication that there is a limit beyond which 
it may not pass. 

But new truths recognized and grasped are truths 
brought within range of the human mind and communi- 
cated to it ; each new truth is a revelation to the mind 
perceiving it. It is the part of each one's reason to 
weigh and examine, and to judge in regard to what comes 
to the mind claiming to be truth, whether it is truth or 
not. The truth can be received and assimilated in no 
other way. "What is accepted without such examination 
and private judgment, simply on authority, may be true, 
or it may not, so far as the mind which so receives it 



AUTHORITY AND TRUTH. 91 

knows. All that mind has. is its confidence in the trust- 
worthiness of its authority, and the acceptance of au- 
thority to decide questions which God has given the 
mind a faculty to judge of for itself, is putting the soul 
in fetters, putting a Chinese bandage on its feet, clipping 
the wings of reason God-given to fly with, putting out 
the eyes of the soul God-given to see with. It is intel- 
lectual and moral self-stultification and suicide. The 
truth, which is accepted as such simply on authority, does 
not contribute to the growth of the soul in power, or 
love of truth, or ability to grasp other truths ; it crip- 
ples it ; it remains a burden foreign to the mind and not 
its own. It is to the soul as food would be to the body 
if swallowed in mass, unprepared and unchewed. Au- 
thority which assumes to settle matters for the mind of 
man simply as authority, is pernicious, no matter from 
what source it claims its origin. "Willingness to accept 
one's truths on authority, without the stamp of reason and 
private judgment certifying to their genuineness, is the 
road to foolishness and spiritual death. 

The mind of man must work for its truths if it would 
make progress worthy of its dignity. The world's 
knowledge of the facts of nature has come by diligent 
study, by close watching of nature's processes, by put- 
ting together this and that and the other, and then by 
setting the reason to judge of their meaning and the 
truths behind them. 

According to the faithfulness and diligence with which 
this work has been followed, has been the world's prog- 
ress in scientific knowledge of the material universe and 
the truths underlying and explaining its phenomena, a 
field of truth that the world has even yet but begun to 
conquer. 

Similarly in regard to spiritual and moral truths, the 



92 THE MISSING SENSE. 

world is passing into a dawning day. Its light is ever 
brightening, but the night is close behind and we are 
not yet out of its shadow. 

As in physical science so here, the road to truth is 
through diligent thought and study, not of authorities but 
of the nature of things, by observing mental, and moral, 
and spiritual facts, by putting this and that and the other 
together, and by setting the reason to judge of their nec- 
essary meaning. 

The work and the words of others are worthy of each 
one's attention. Without the help of others we could 
not hope to keep within sight of the world's progress, 
much less to contribute to it. The mind follows easily 
where others have led. The reason reviews quickly and 
judges easily the recorded processes by which the judg- 
ment of others has been determined as to what is true, 
and in so doing it tests them anew for itself. 

Truths, the perception of which has been an out- 
growth of the thought and inspiration of bygone ages, 
have axiomatic force now they are won, and the mind 
that stands on the platform of truth, which the ages have 
built for it, receives them instantly and knows them to be 
true. So each thinker may light in the vanguard and 
help to conquer new truth from the realm of the un- 
known. 

What are the sources from which new truths are de- 
rived ? In physical science truths perceived are the 
methods according to which the processes carried on in 
the material universe are conducted, or processes or real- 
ities the existence of which was before unknown. Man 
does not make these truths, by diligent attention he 
perceives them true. Their source is in the power that 
conducts the universe — that is, in God. What man is 
studying are God's works, God's methods, God's records, 



AUTHORITY AND TRUTH. 93 

God's thought as wrought into these. Hence, truth in 
physical science is the Word of God, and study and 
thought are man's interrogation of God for new truth, 
an added word. 

In spiritual science the mind of man interrogates it- 
self and others for facts which man has not made, but 
which are in the nature of mind and its relations to other 
things from its origin. Man does not make truth, he 
perceives it. One mind communicates the truth it has 
perceived to others with more or less of the process by 
which its judgment that it is truth has been determined. 
The minds to which that thought is communicated, 
weigh it, review those processes, judge for themselves, 
and put the stamp of their own reason on the thought as 
to whether it is true or not. 

But what of thought itself ; is it man's work ? Man 
may turn his mind into the channel he wishes to pursue, 
he may read what others have written, and listen to what 
they have to say, and so receive the thoughts of others 
into his mind : he may recall from his memory the 
thoughts which he has previously entertained, but he 
cannot by any effort of his own think a new thought. 
He is as helpless in the effort as if he should attempt to 
create a new world ; it is beyond his power ; he cannot 
make a beginning. By receiviug into his mind, how- 
ever, the thoughts which have been previously given in 
relation to the topic on which he desires new truth, by 
fixing his attention on the truth contained in them, and 
letting that illuminate his understanding he prepares 
his mind to receive new thought, and new thought is 
given him. It comes to him as a discovery. It was not 
his, and he has not made it ; he has received it ; it has 
come to him as bearing truth, and his reason must now 
judge the quality of its burden, and receive, digest, and 



94 THE MISSING SENSE. 

assimilate the truth that is in it, the truth which he did 
not make but has perceived. Whence does this thought 
come ? 

The history of progress in knowledge shows a striking 
tendency for new thought on the same topic and of the 
same kind, to spring up, as it were, spontaneously in many 
minds and in many places about the same time. "When 
the time is ripe for the world to receive new truth, that 
truth seems to be in the atmosphere, and the thinking 
world is on the alert for it, though it may be that just 
before such a thought was not entertained by any, and 
if it had been offered to the world it would have been 
dismissed without a hearing. 

Thus new truth comes in due time, after due prepara- 
tion, to the single person or to the world from without, 
and this is inspiration. 

Since, then, man never makes truth, never has made 
it, and never can make it, but it is all communicated to 
him and shown him, it follows tjiat the source of all truth 
is in the source of nature and of spirit. All truth is the 
Word of God. 

But truth cannot come to the mind of man with other 
force than its own axiomatic force which the reason rec- 
ognizes. If God Himself conveys new truth to a man 
He must do it by causing that man's reason to perceive 
that the communication is true. If this is not done the 
truth is not conveyed, has not entered into the mind of 
the man who is supposed to receive it. If it is com- 
municated through man to his fellow-man the same is 
true. 

In ancient times honest men have believed that through 
them the Word of God has been communicated to be an 
authority to their fellow-men, and much truth, the value 
of which is beyond all computation, has been given to 



AUTHORITY AND TRUTH. 95 

man through their writings. Yet error has not been ex- 
eluded from any such communication. It could not rea- 
sonably be expected to be excluded. Man is weak and 
imperfect, his limitations make him necessarily liable to 
errors, yet when a communication is conveyed through 
a man, that man becomes a link in the chain of authority, 
and a chain is no stronger than its weakest link. If ab- 
solute truth were conveyed in dictated words, yet the 
limitations of the understanding could not exclude error 
from the perception of it, and man can communicate 
only the thoughts that are in him received through his 
own perceptions. Again, ail communications which are 
usually claimed to be authoritative revelations of abso- 
lute truth have come down to us through the hands of 
many men of many generations, every one of whom has 
become a link in the chain of authority and a source of 
liability to error. And, in fact, when these communica- 
tions are read as other books are read, with a mind not 
made up beforehand > that they are authority and that all 
that is said in them must necessarily be truth, which 
other truth must be made to fit, there is not one of them 
in which traces of error will not be perceived in the 
light which the world now enjoys. To say this is not 
denying these books to be the Word of God. The 
amount and the value of the truth which has been given 
to man through them is wonderful, especially wonderful 
when the date of the communication is remembered, and 
that truth could have no other source than God. 

What we have said is simply that the human is not 
excluded, and that, with the human, error has entered 
their pages. They are to be read as- other books are to 
be read, in the light of the reason which God has given 
man. 

That truth shall be perceived through the reason is the 



96 THE MISSING SENSE. 

method established by God Himself, through which the 
mind of man is developed in intelligence and power. 
The method by authority is pernicious and destructive. 
For thousands of years man has sought for and insisted 
on an authority ; he has sought for and insisted on his 
bane, and, except the faculty of reason, no authority has 
been given him. 

Writings supposed by their authors, or, we might say, 
by those through whom the thoughts are communicated, 
to be revelations by authority are not confined to ancient 
times. Not one of the prophets, or any of the apostles, 
were more honest, or more deeply convinced of the 
truth of what they had to communicate, or of the au- 
thority on which it rested than was Emanuel Sweden- 
borg, but little more than a hundred years ago. What 
he put on record he recorded as from things seen and 
heard, and revealed to him from heaven. If he had not 
been in part mistaken as to that, error should have been 
excluded from the communications so revealed to him, 
but it was not. What he received as absolute truth from 
heaven agreed with the science of his day, but in some 
points, as that the moon and Jupiter are inhabited by 
men with physical organizations similar to ours, we have 
now sufficient scientific knowledge to assure us that his 
revelation is untrue. It was not known in his day as it 
is now, what conditions must accompany the fact that 
the moon is without perceptible atmosphere, and that 
Jupiter is red-hot. So, also, in what he received as reve- 
lation from heaven that the men of the earliest ages of 
human history were much wiser and better than those of 
his own day ; if his revelation had been given a hundred 
years later it would doubtless have been different. In 
other points, some of which he makes very prominent, 
as in regard to the human form of heavenly societies 



AUTHOKITY AKD TRUTH. 97 

and of heaven itself, while neither human reason nor 
scientific knowledge can reach such matters, to decide 
them one way or the other, and, therefore, they must 
stand for what they are worth, yet his revelations seem 
to be tainted with a flavor of notions which advancing 
knowledge and better means of research have shown to 
be false, as the notion held by some as an hypothesis 
to account for the reproduction of species true to their 
kind, before the microscope had become an effective in- 
strument of research, that their ultimate organic particles 
were each in form and structure like the perfect whole. 

For this reason such revelations have less force than 
perhaps they otherwise might have. Nevertheless, 
Swedenborg was a pure and good man, who loved the 
truth, and thoughts given through such a man are pure 
and good, adapted to benefit and never to injure any 
other soul. Much that he has said is eminently reason- 
able and full of suggestiveness. His thoughts, like the 
thoughts of any earnest and honest man, are worthy of 
the attention of seekers after truth. Through such new 
truth is given. That there is enough of obvious error 
in his writings to preclude the idea of setting them up 
as an absolute authority is no reason to the contrary. 
The force of his truths, like that of all truth, is the axio- 
matic force that is in them. 

Men have been, yet are, and ever must be inspired of 
God with His truth as their minds are fitted to receive 
it, yet they themselves are never omitted from the re- 
sult. To use an expression of Oliver Wendell Holmes, 
if Smith is inspired the result is a smithate of truth, if 
Brown a browmate, and if Paul a paulate of truth is the 
result. One will differ from the other, though truth 
must be invariable and truth be in all. 

It is a function of reason to detect and eliminate the 
variable human element of error. 



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